Date: Wed, 07 Apr 1999 22:31:46 -0600 From: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> To: advocacy@freebsd.org, Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Subject: Data Communications Magazine article Message-ID: <370C3132.29B9E0F2@softweyr.com>
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Mr. Lee Bruno, Data Communications Magazine Re: your April 7, 1999 article "Open-Source Software: Power to the People" Mr. Bruno, I read the referenced article with great interest and care. I am pleased to see such even and fair coverage of Open Source software, and am particularly pleased to see your mention of BSD systems, often overlooked by your colleagues in the popular computing press. I would like to provide you with some additional information on the wealth of openly available software for BSD systems. Your article missed some relatively important functionality that your readers may need in order to make informed decisions about what BSD systems may do for them. Paid professional support is available for the FreeBSD operating system from FreeBSD Mall; details are available at http://www.freebsdmall.com/. Each of the Open Source BSD operating system groups also offers lists of consultants familiar with BSD systems; many of these can provide professional support on an ad hoc basis as well. All are supported through the usual mail and web resources as mentioned in your article. Clustering is most certainly in the cards for FreeBSD as well. Several projects are working on various forms of clustering, and have stable reliable systems based on clustering technology. Simple server load balancing, a weak form of clustering, is available from the Eddieware project at http:://www.eddieware.org/. The David Sarnoff Research Center has created a loosely coupled cluster of FreeBSD machines for parallel computational work; see ftp://ftp.sarnoff.com/pub/mnfs/www/docs/cluster.html for more information about their parallel computing cluster. Both Linux and BSD systems support standard, open-source LDAP servers. Linux and FreeBSD also support PAM--Pluggable Authentication Modules--to enable user authentication via LDP servers. While interoperability with NDS and AD is not guaranteed, it is certainly a goal of the developers of the LDAP PAM modules. Linux does have a 2 GByte filesystem, ext2fs, but this limitation has never hampered BSD systems. The ufs filesystem in BSD has supported large filesystem sizes for many years. FreeBSD 3.1 has added softupdate support, which allows asynchronous updates of filesystem data without the dangers of the Linux ext2fs approach, and the Vinum Volume Manager, which allows administrators to add space from new disk drives to existing filesystems. These additions make FreeBSD by far the best open source system for supporting large disk systems. *** Need to quote maximum file and filesystem sizes here. *** *** Need a good reference for Vinum here. At a minimum, we can point him at http://www.lemis.com/vinum.html if OK with Greg Lehey. *** *** Should also have a reference for the online art gallery, since they use a huge amount of disk space. *** Comments, please? I'd like to send this tomorrow. -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC http://www.softweyr.com/~softweyr wes@softweyr.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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