*BSD News Article 93246


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From: uhclem@nemesis.lonestar.org (Frank Durda IV)
Subject: Re: Linux or FreeBSD (or something else?)
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]
Organization: The Big Blue Box
Message-ID: <E8EM2H.E5o@nemesis.lonestar.org>
References: <5hcbac$r22@news.gvsu.edu> <859659793-6-9882@manatee.envirolink.org> <33455DE7.72D5@multics-a.pms.ford.com> <Pine.BSF.3.91.970405001440.6436B-100000@dolphin.inna.net> <334665fc.659312482@news.diac.com> <3349A82B.167EB0E7@FreeBSD.org>
Date: Thu, 10 Apr 1997 04:06:16 GMT
Lines: 59
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:38839 alt.os.linux:20046 comp.os.linux.misc:169030


Jordan K. Hubbard (jkh@FreeBSD.org) wrote:
: There are other considerations as well, such as the fact that I will NOT
: log into a machine over the Internet these days without using ssh.  I
: don't even run telnetd or rlogind on machines which are important to me,
: only sshd.  How do I get a secure shell connection into my NT box, eh?

They implement "security" in a different way, as my company recently
discovered.  :-)

Someone set up a webcache system using NetBSD*, and although it overloaded
frequently, it did work.  Someone else set up a Microsoft-provided Webcache
system that runs under NT to demonstrate that (IHisO) NT was better
(the attempt to show NT was better at doing USENET News failed the previous
week).  This machine had 2GB of disk for the test.  Anyway, after a while
it was noticed that the NT webcache was locked-up.  No surprise, because
it had gone down a few times when it was first put into use by 70 or so
clients.  Because this was Saturday and since NT has no remote sysadmin
abilities worth mentioning via TCP/IP, the guy on duty was instructed to
hit the reset button on that machine.

After an hour, the guy running the experiment called from home to say the
box wasn't responding to pings yet and would the on-duty person see what
was going on.  The NT box was *still* cleaning the 2GB filesystem, and
continued to do so for a total of over four hours!  That works out to
less than 1MB "cleaned" per minute.  This was a 120MHz Pentium system with
128Meg of RAM, 2940 SCSI.

Eventually, NT came up, started the Microsoft WebCache software which
immediately proclaimed "The HTML cache is corrupt" and proceeded to delete
every single one the files (pages) it had just spent four hours "cleaning".
This took another hour or so before it started actually performing useful
operations for people.

A check of the NT manuals indicate there is no way to bring a NT
system up at all without letting it clean all filesystems.

We were sort of curious how long a reboot would take on a 32GB news
filesystem.  We would probably have to tell the customers "The news
system is coming up, and should be up in about five days.  We apologize
for the invonvienence."

NTs "security" technique is apparently to crash on external accesses
and then spend so much time cleaning filesystems that anyone would lose
interest in the contents before they could get to them, then have the
OS delete the contents just to be sure...  :-)

I don't think the NT WebCache or NT News Server products (which we would
have to purchase licenses for to endure this further) has a home here.
The free UNIX products seem to work considerably better.  :-)


Frank Durda IV <uhclem@nemesis.lonestar.org>|"We are the phone company.
or uhclem%nemesis@rwsystr.nkn.net           | Resistance is normal.
					    | Loading coils are normal.
or ...letni!rwsys!nemesis!uhclem	    | Capacitance is free."
(c) 1997, ask before reprinting.

* Not my choice - I would have selected FreeBSD.