On Tue, 2 Feb 1999, Matthew Kirkwood wrote:
> > > Probably, although it wouldn't be a single box, and probably not running
> > > a free Unix.
> >
> > Why not?
>
> No (or few) technical reasons. The same reasons that my work uses Solaris
> for everything expect a few routers and lightly loaded proxies. By the
> time you deal with 1M mails a day (and not mailing list traffic) you want
> a little more resilience to whatever failures may come..
That's suit mentality, frankly. I've run both Solaris and Linux systems in
heavily loaded situations, and have had greater long-run stability from a
well-tuned linux system.
Solaris simply started losing it's mind after prolonged periods of uptime
(specific case was a pair of Oracle servers; after a few months of uptime,
the machines started behaving badly, zombies refusing to be reaped, etc;
half-way through shutdown on one of them, the kernel finally just got it
over with and panic'd ;-). (This is Solaris/SPARC, if it matters.)
On the flip side, I've had Linux boxen run for what basically seems like
forever, running all manner of user tasks on relatively cheap PC hardware,
without hiccups. Tells me a lot about that "Sun resilience". ;-)
> Sure. I'd have Linux instead, but I can't imagine either having
> significant difficulty pissing all over NT/Exchange.
I don't think anyone will disagree there. ;-)
--
Edward S. Marshall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [ What goes up, must come down. ]
http://www.logic.net/~emarshal/ [ Ask any system administrator. ]
