Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 23:37:13 -0800 From: jehamby@lightside.com (Jake Hamby) To: rminnich@Sarnoff.COM, steve@visint.co.uk Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: more Mac vs BSD (fwd) Message-ID: <199703270737.XAA01417@hamby1>
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Steve Roome writes: > You think this is bad, I was looking at some websites yesterday and found > a 'powered by a Mac' link, needless to say I followed it (whilst laughing) > to this: > > http://prod01.apple.com/productinfo/datasheets/ss/aiss.html > > which really has to be seen to be beleived, particularly the quote near > the top about Affordability. (... lowest-cost WWW server available today > .... etc.. ) > > I took up the offer of contacting the webmaster, but haven't got a reply > yet. Okay, realistically speaking, the majority of Web sites don't get all that many hits. For Joe Random Businessowner, who wants to "get on the Internet", honestly I think they'd be better off with a "one-click" solution that came with a bunch of bundled software for site design. Now, it's the rest of the Web sites, the ones that get serious volume, for which running MacOS is not just unrealistic, it's absurd. For the really serious sites, like ftp.cdrom.com, I think the biggest trick is simply getting enough network bandwidth, RAM, and hard disks (on separate controllers of course). If you have interactive Web pages, you'll want a fast CPU to handle the CGI's (or use a CGI alternative like NSAPI, ISAPI, or if you want to be adventurous, Java servlets!). If Windows NT (blecch!) can handle a site like microsoft.com, then most any flavor of UNIX will be able to handle the load, so you tailor your OS decision based on other factors (familiarity, availability of server software, security, general robustness, etc.). And of course most of us agree that FreeBSD is the best free OS out there for Internet servers. :) Oh, one more random comment. My Internet provider (a few hundred customers), used to run EVERYTHING from a Mac Quadra running A/UX, if you can believe that! Well, actually, the PPP itself was handled by a Livingston Portmaster, but the A/UX box handled USENET, mail, and Web serving. He eventually moved the mail server to a FreeBSD box, but the A/UX box is still there, running innd, and I hate to admit it, but his newsfeed is a damn sight better than what I can get through the news servers at school or work! This just proves that ANY flavor of UNIX (even a sad old SVR2, like A/UX), is a better server than MacOS on the same hardware. Finally, I remember seeing a similar Apple advertisement advocating MacOS, which showed how "complicated" it was to set up a Web server under UNIX, by showing the UNIX commands you would need to type, and the example they gave was clearly showing how to compile and install NCSA (or was it Apache?) running on A/UX! Cheers, Jake
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