Re: Re/Fwd: freebsd specific search
On Thu, 3 Feb 2000, Mike Bristow wrote: > True; but linux has support for a bigger variety of soundcards > (my Win98^H^H^H^H^H^HEverQuest machine now has a Live! in it; supported > under Linux but not under FreeBSD AFAIK; so the other half of the disk > may turn turn into ext2 rather than ffs) Well if you buy esoteric or just cheap hardware... > I generally get the feeling that `Workstation Hardware'[1] has a better > chance of being supported under Linux than FreeBSD. I may be talking rubbish, > though ;-) Cheap hardware has a better chance of being supported. If you stick with the name brand stuff, you could piece together a box that'll work great and work great with FreeBSD. Me, I've got my Micron PC (which was a pretty good deal when I bought it), and the onboard sound is AFAIK supported by that comercial Linux sound driver, but nothing else. The box also came with an AWE64, therefore I'm happy. - alex To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Re/Fwd: freebsd specific search
On Thu, Feb 03, 2000 at 07:58:04PM -0700, Wes Peters wrote: > Mike Bristow wrote: > > > > True; but linux has support for a bigger variety of soundcards > > (my Win98^H^H^H^H^H^HEverQuest machine now has a Live! in it; supported > > under Linux but not under FreeBSD AFAIK; so the other half of the disk > > may turn turn into ext2 rather than ffs) > > > > The other 2 boxes will, of course, stay FreeBSD. > > You'd switch operating systems for the sake of a sound card? That seems > backwards to this correspondent. Just buy a reasonable sound card that > works under your system of choice; they're less expensive than a system > installation. You're right of course. But the system of choice is EverQuest[1], not FreeBSD. 98% of the time it's on, it's running Windows. Until Verant produce a linux or FreeBSD or BeOS or whatever client, I don't have any choice in the matter. [1] at the moment. It'll probably change to some other game later. -- Mike Bristow, Geek At Large ``Beware of Invisible Cows'' To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Re/Fwd: freebsd specific search
Mike Bristow wrote: > > True; but linux has support for a bigger variety of soundcards > (my Win98^H^H^H^H^H^HEverQuest machine now has a Live! in it; supported > under Linux but not under FreeBSD AFAIK; so the other half of the disk > may turn turn into ext2 rather than ffs) > > The other 2 boxes will, of course, stay FreeBSD. You'd switch operating systems for the sake of a sound card? That seems backwards to this correspondent. Just buy a reasonable sound card that works under your system of choice; they're less expensive than a system installation. > I generally get the feeling that `Workstation Hardware'[1] has a better > chance of being supported under Linux than FreeBSD. I may be talking rubbish, > though ;-) > > [1] SoundCards; funky USB magic to talk to your digital camera; that kind of > thing. USB? Linux? I don't think so. -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://softweyr.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Re/Fwd: freebsd specific search
On Wed, Feb 02, 2000 at 09:59:08PM -0800, Alex Zepeda wrote: > On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Michael Bacarella wrote: > > > Not to start a flame-fest or anything (but who doesn't love em?), I hear > > the above quite a lot. > > > > I'm under the firm belief that a decent sys admin can rub either system to > > do whatever they want it to do. Not that I am questioning your abilities. > > I just get the "yeah, Linux is good, but just try to use it in a > > production environment and you'll understand" a lot. > > Needless to say I think that FreeBSD makes a great desktop environment > too. What contributes to server sanity also makes things much less > confusing for a desktop user too :) True; but linux has support for a bigger variety of soundcards (my Win98^H^H^H^H^H^HEverQuest machine now has a Live! in it; supported under Linux but not under FreeBSD AFAIK; so the other half of the disk may turn turn into ext2 rather than ffs) The other 2 boxes will, of course, stay FreeBSD. I generally get the feeling that `Workstation Hardware'[1] has a better chance of being supported under Linux than FreeBSD. I may be talking rubbish, though ;-) [1] SoundCards; funky USB magic to talk to your digital camera; that kind of thing. -- Mike Bristow, Geek At Large ``Beware of Invisible Cows'' To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Re/Fwd: freebsd specific search
On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Michael Bacarella wrote: > Not to start a flame-fest or anything (but who doesn't love em?), I hear > the above quite a lot. > > I'm under the firm belief that a decent sys admin can rub either system to > do whatever they want it to do. Not that I am questioning your abilities. > I just get the "yeah, Linux is good, but just try to use it in a > production environment and you'll understand" a lot. Needless to say I think that FreeBSD makes a great desktop environment too. What contributes to server sanity also makes things much less confusing for a desktop user too :) - alex To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Re/Fwd: freebsd specific search
:On Wed, Feb 02, 2000 at 10:59:34AM -0800, Matthew Dillon wrote: : :Re NFS stability. What version of the 3.x branch contained the updated NFS :code? 3.3? : :Thanks, :sk : :-- :[EMAIL PROTECTED] 3.3 got a big chunk of it but 3.4 has even more. 4.0 has all the bug fixes (there were some that we simply couldn't backport, mainly related to garbage beyond the file EOF in mmap() and things like that). -Matt Matthew Dillon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Re/Fwd: freebsd specific search
> > > What sort of quality-control measures does Slackware have? Where > > do I access their cvs tree? Where do I access their problem reports? > > Where do I subscribe to get every commit message? How long are > > their code freezes? How many committers do they have? What > > mechanism creates their releases? Where do I get release-candidates? > > Hmmm. my face is red. > > These aren't quite technical limitations as they are political ones. [snip] Not having an orderly development process has caused quite a few technical limitations for Linux. Not having any sort of standardized and reproducible release process is notable; lack of version control is one of the more serious problems I have with Linux. Not really political, but (dis)organizational To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Re/Fwd: freebsd specific search
On Wed, Feb 02, 2000 at 10:59:34AM -0800, Matthew Dillon wrote: > Linux has made great strides in the performance area -- the are way ahead > of us on SMP issues, but they are definitely still behind in the > reliable department. They almost caught up when we were going through > our 3.0/3.1 fiasco but then fell behind again. I agree with your general > assessment (though I'm even more rabid about NT, which I consider > plain and simply to be a piece of crap). > > It interesting to note that two years ago it was well known that running > NFSv3 under FreeBSD would destabilize it, so most people ran NFSv2. > Even NFSv2 2 years ago had problems. Linux is just reaching the point > now with NFSv2 where we were with NFSv3 two years ago. Thus in regards > to NFS, FreeBSD is about 2 years ahead of Linux. At this time both > NFSv2 and NFSv3 under FreeBSD are considered stable and reliable. > Re NFS stability. What version of the 3.x branch contained the updated NFS code? 3.3? Thanks, sk -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Re/Fwd: freebsd specific search
:On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Michael Bacarella wrote: :> Granted, a lot of Linux distributions are totally unsuited for a server :> environment. Compared to that, I could understand why the :> server-orientedness of FreeBSD is attractive, but I certainly couldn't put :> up a reasonable arguement for either side in Slackware Linux vs. FreeBSD. : :Linux is definitely a less reliable system for clustering than freebsd. :I've got 5 years of running them both at Sarnoff to back me up. Maybe I :was doing something wrong, but I'm seeing similar problems here at the ACL :on Linux. : :We ran into four classes of problems that linux had that freebsd did not. :These problems are still not fixed as of 2.2.x or 2.3.x. : :1) network stack. heavy use of udp can result in a hung kernel. Trivial : TCP servers that need to take lots of connections cause trouble -- : clients start getting ECONNREFUSED after a while :2) nfs. Hit nfs hard and random clients will hang. The dirty little : secret of linux clusters is that 'everyone knows' that you don't run : client nfs on linux cluster nodes if you want the cluster to stay up. : This came out clearly at a cluster conference last spring (JCP4). :3) vm system. There's still some strange problems in there. :4) ext2. ext2 does not handle unplanned outages well. There is a : reasonable chance that after a power fail you're going to have trouble : if you have 100 nodes or more. You'll see 2 or 3 in need of help. : :freebsd was just more solid on our clusters. But note that linux isn't :standing still -- it's just not as good as freebsd yet. I had one freebsd :cluster that ran through 5 years of anything we could throw at it -- power :fail, etc. It took disk death to finally halt one node and require me to :hook up a keyboard to it to reload it. : :Our general experience was that NT fails a lot, esp. if you ask it to talk :to a network or run a screensaver. Linux clusters run a long time, but :power outages and other unplanned events will cause it trouble. Freebsd :tolerates very high levels of abuse. The UFS guys really know their stuff. : :ron Linux has made great strides in the performance area -- the are way ahead of us on SMP issues, but they are definitely still behind in the reliable department. They almost caught up when we were going through our 3.0/3.1 fiasco but then fell behind again. I agree with your general assessment (though I'm even more rabid about NT, which I consider plain and simply to be a piece of crap). It interesting to note that two years ago it was well known that running NFSv3 under FreeBSD would destabilize it, so most people ran NFSv2. Even NFSv2 2 years ago had problems. Linux is just reaching the point now with NFSv2 where we were with NFSv3 two years ago. Thus in regards to NFS, FreeBSD is about 2 years ahead of Linux. At this time both NFSv2 and NFSv3 under FreeBSD are considered stable and reliable. -Matt Matthew Dillon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Re/Fwd: freebsd specific search
> It's release structure means FreeBSD is a complete operating system (as > opposed to a kernel and one of several distributions) and machines are > maintainable and upgradable in production over long periods of time via > the STABLE branch. I can agree with you here, as our organization has benefitted from said features. Although we aren't having the most pleasant time going from 2.2.8-STABLE to a 3.3.4-STABLE ever since the elfining. But that's probably our own fault for letting some of them get so out of date. :) > The FreeBSD kernel internals seem to have consistantly scaled further than the > Linux kernel over the last few years (though linux has improved lots recently). > This isn't a problem in most production enviroments however in marginal > configurations it can be nasty. I had a very bad day six months ago attemting > to patch a linux kernel to have >2048 file descriptors. Useless Anecdote Warning: For some particular reason (I'll spare the details of what lead up to this) I ping -f'd a FreeBSD box from a Linux box. The FreeBSD box held up very well. Despite this, my coworker (who owns said box) put icmp limits in place to further lessen the load. This attack was barely noticable on a neighboring Linux machine. (In fact, I was so annoyed that it had such a meager effect that I went to several other machines and had them all join in on the ping -f'ing fun). I experimented with variable packet sizes but I never did quite get to lock down the Linux machine as badly as I could the FreeBSD. Maybe I was just equating dropped packets with increased cpu availability as a plus, whereas FreeBSD put more effort into replying to all of the requests. Anyway, coworker also modified his system to dedicate more memory to the mbuf pool as well as some other tweaks which may or may not have done anything. Frustrated with my inability to saturate his FreeBSD box, I switched my attack to UDP. It was a basic UDP packet flood which, evidently, should've justed pushed as many packets onto the wire as the physical medium would allow. My machine is a P166 whereas his is a dual PPro200. The packet flood rendered the machine useless as far as networks go within 10 seconds. He tried it (out of annoyance) on a Linux machine which barely showed signs of struggle. Then, out of curiousity he turned it towards his Indy running Irix (don't remember the version). The machine fell right off the network in less than 3 seconds. Not only that, but when the flood stopped, the machine still wouldn't come back. One week later, the machine is still dead, despite reboots. Hardware damage? Neat! We are both using fairly recent versions of our respective systems, but I don't claim that either of us configured them optimally. Ho hum. If you can find a moral to this story, let me know. :) -MB To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Re/Fwd: freebsd specific search
> What sort of quality-control measures does Slackware have? Where > do I access their cvs tree? Where do I access their problem reports? > Where do I subscribe to get every commit message? How long are > their code freezes? How many committers do they have? What > mechanism creates their releases? Where do I get release-candidates? Hmmm. my face is red. These aren't quite technical limitations as they are political ones. FreeBSD will naturally be more organized in this respect since the entire system is under the survey and control of one organization. This certainly makes it conveniant because you only have one source of information, and thusly it will be (or is easily made) uniform. I can't quite subscribe to a Slackware Linux mailing list and get information on changes to MySQL as well as Apache, but it's not out of the question for me to listen in on MySQL, Apache, and Slackware information channels, although their mechanisms obviously are not uniform. I suppose our needs just vary. :) But hey, we love FreeBSD too. -MB To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Re/Fwd: freebsd specific search
On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Michael Bacarella wrote: > Granted, a lot of Linux distributions are totally unsuited for a server > environment. Compared to that, I could understand why the > server-orientedness of FreeBSD is attractive, but I certainly couldn't put > up a reasonable arguement for either side in Slackware Linux vs. FreeBSD. Linux is definitely a less reliable system for clustering than freebsd. I've got 5 years of running them both at Sarnoff to back me up. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but I'm seeing similar problems here at the ACL on Linux. We ran into four classes of problems that linux had that freebsd did not. These problems are still not fixed as of 2.2.x or 2.3.x. 1) network stack. heavy use of udp can result in a hung kernel. Trivial TCP servers that need to take lots of connections cause trouble -- clients start getting ECONNREFUSED after a while 2) nfs. Hit nfs hard and random clients will hang. The dirty little secret of linux clusters is that 'everyone knows' that you don't run client nfs on linux cluster nodes if you want the cluster to stay up. This came out clearly at a cluster conference last spring (JCP4). 3) vm system. There's still some strange problems in there. 4) ext2. ext2 does not handle unplanned outages well. There is a reasonable chance that after a power fail you're going to have trouble if you have 100 nodes or more. You'll see 2 or 3 in need of help. freebsd was just more solid on our clusters. But note that linux isn't standing still -- it's just not as good as freebsd yet. I had one freebsd cluster that ran through 5 years of anything we could throw at it -- power fail, etc. It took disk death to finally halt one node and require me to hook up a keyboard to it to reload it. Our general experience was that NT fails a lot, esp. if you ask it to talk to a network or run a screensaver. Linux clusters run a long time, but power outages and other unplanned events will cause it trouble. Freebsd tolerates very high levels of abuse. The UFS guys really know their stuff. ron To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Re/Fwd: freebsd specific search
On Wed, Feb 02, 2000 at 11:18:23AM -0500, Michael Bacarella wrote: > > > systems have the highest availability rate possible. Over the last few > > years, I have replaced almost all of our Linux-based servers with FreeBSD, > > due to the quality-control measures that the FreeBSD development team have > > implemented. > > Not to start a flame-fest or anything (but who doesn't love em?), I hear > the above quite a lot. > > I'm under the firm belief that a decent sys admin can rub either system to > do whatever they want it to do. Not that I am questioning your abilities. > I just get the "yeah, Linux is good, but just try to use it in a > production environment and you'll understand" a lot. > > Granted, a lot of Linux distributions are totally unsuited for a server > environment. Compared to that, I could understand why the > server-orientedness of FreeBSD is attractive, but I certainly couldn't put > up a reasonable arguement for either side in Slackware Linux vs. FreeBSD. > I am going to regret this, but For production enviroments FreeBSD has two significant advantages. It's release structure means FreeBSD is a complete operating system (as opposed to a kernel and one of several distributions) and machines are maintainable and upgradable in production over long periods of time via the STABLE branch. The FreeBSD kernel internals seem to have consistantly scaled further than the Linux kernel over the last few years (though linux has improved lots recently). This isn't a problem in most production enviroments however in marginal configurations it can be nasty. I had a very bad day six months ago attemting to patch a linux kernel to have >2048 file descriptors. -- GeoffB To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Re/Fwd: freebsd specific search
On Wed 2000-02-02 (11:18), Michael Bacarella wrote: > > systems have the highest availability rate possible. Over the last few > > years, I have replaced almost all of our Linux-based servers with FreeBSD, > > due to the quality-control measures that the FreeBSD development team have > > implemented. > > Not to start a flame-fest or anything (but who doesn't love em?), I hear > the above quite a lot. (I don't like them.) > I certainly couldn't put up a reasonable arguement for either side in > Slackware Linux vs. FreeBSD. > > Could you? Nope. I can't say I know Slackware or its quality-control measures, so could you please answer some questions for me? What sort of quality-control measures does Slackware have? Where do I access their cvs tree? Where do I access their problem reports? Where do I subscribe to get every commit message? How long are their code freezes? How many committers do they have? What mechanism creates their releases? Where do I get release-candidates? (I apologize if that sounds argumentative, it really isn't. It just addresses some of the things that I do know about FreeBSD with regards to quality control, and what I don't know about Slackware in order to answer your question.) Neil -- Neil Blakey-Milner [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Re/Fwd: freebsd specific search
> systems have the highest availability rate possible. Over the last few > years, I have replaced almost all of our Linux-based servers with FreeBSD, > due to the quality-control measures that the FreeBSD development team have > implemented. Not to start a flame-fest or anything (but who doesn't love em?), I hear the above quite a lot. I'm under the firm belief that a decent sys admin can rub either system to do whatever they want it to do. Not that I am questioning your abilities. I just get the "yeah, Linux is good, but just try to use it in a production environment and you'll understand" a lot. Granted, a lot of Linux distributions are totally unsuited for a server environment. Compared to that, I could understand why the server-orientedness of FreeBSD is attractive, but I certainly couldn't put up a reasonable arguement for either side in Slackware Linux vs. FreeBSD. Could you? -MB To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
