Re: [tlug] Re: Alan Cox's remark at Fosdem

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Josh" == Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com> writes:

    Josh> On Tue, 01 Mar 2005 17:02:50 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull
    Josh> <stephen@example.com> wrote:

    >> Uva's (I think it was) original point, that the Linux VM is too
    >> dangerous to use in a production system, may still stand, at
    >> least for some admins.  But it's a tradeoff, and Linus has been
    >> awfully good at making those, and recovering from his own (and
    >> tytso's ;-) mistakes.

    Josh> I do not doubt that Net or FreeBSD are much more stable than
    Josh> Linux. I ran Net on my only production machine (my gateway
    Josh> router / mailserver) for awhile,

Well, I've been running Linux on my mail/webserver for ten years.  In
that time the most frequent causes of service outage are

(1) the University network failed (and this is the one that accounts
for the most total downtime, maybe 80% of it, if you exclude the
Apache crash that happened when I was on vacation for a week and had
just started learning firewalls -- I was unable to get to any of my
machines because ssh was blocked, too!

(2) `sid' cruelty (or simply Debian maintainer incompetence)

(3) server software crashes

(4) pilot error (see "ssh", above)

(5) hardware failures

(6) Linux crashes (of which I haven't seen one in a 2.even kernel this
century)

All data loss has been due to hardware problems, either where the
hardware just broke or due to vendor refusal to document drivers were
incomplete.

Mind you, I haven't run anything less than a n.m.10 kernel on my
mailserver since Linux 2.0.9.  I didn't cut over to 2.4 until 2.4.18
or so.  I don't run 2.6 on any of my boxes.  I don't try to squeeze
maximum performance from the latest and greatest hardware; I just buy
more memory.

Just look at the version numbers.  NetBSD, with a history almost as
long as Linux's, has in total maybe as many releases as Linux 1.2 had
all by itself, and that series was obsoleted in 1998.  It's just a
different approach to quality control.

    Josh> Linux will rule my desktop for quite a few years to come, it
    Josh> would seem, as the BSDs just do not have the wealth of
    Josh> software or drivers available.

Buy a Mac, get the wealthiest software and drivers there is.  ("Hiroshi"
Saxon's tastes notwithstanding.)  I mean, XEmacs and Finder on the
same box, how much better can it get?  (At least on a notebook that
doesn't have space to install a wet bar!)

    >> Irrelevant in a world where the author is almost always too
    >> expensive to hire for maintenance work.

    Josh> My point was for the author's benefit.

Heh.  Are there real authors on this list who can't recite that,
chapter and verse?  But there are lots of admins and users who need to
know how to identify hackers worth employing: they're the ones who
leave behind comments you can understand.  :-)

    Josh> [1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/bsd/

What a waste.  Debian, gentoo, ubuntu, DarwinPorts, pkgsrc, ....  And
don't get me started on GNU itself!

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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