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Date:      Thu, 08 Mar 2001 14:08:55 +0000
From:      "Lourdes H. Smith" <lhsmith@cfl.rr.com>
To:        Doug Young <dougy@gargoyle.apana.org.au>
Cc:        Jesper Holmberg <jeho5791@student.uu.se>, freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG, b.j.smith@ieee.org, thebs@theseus.com, "Denis J. Cirulis" <monster@okb.lv>
Subject:   Re: About Unix <- Doug needs a good rebuking
Message-ID:  <3AA79277.32455314@cfl.rr.com>
References:  <OFA420CC63.6AEAEDB6-ON87256A08.006994B1@smed.com> <01030800251100.00557@r55h47.res.gatech.edu> <20010308115639.A4298@strindberg.maisel.enst-bretagne.fr> <022801c0a7c0$024f8860$847e03cb@apana.org.au>

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Re: About Unix <- Doug needs a good rebuking

Lourdes' husband here --

Okay Doug, you are so full of crap, my wife came to me with
questions based on your misinformation.  That's sad.  Learn the
systems and only talk about _what_you_know_!  I rebuke your comments
below.  The key here is _technical_facts_.  Now if you want to talk
about those, come to ELUG (http://www.elug.org).  We cater to all
OSS (Open Source Software) users.

Doug Young wrote:
> Try the following on both a linux & a BSD system
> setup two identical systems,one with linux & other with BSD
> give them both a few jobs to do, then hit the "reset" button
> (you do have power failures in Sweden don't you ??)
> invariably the BSD system will recover with no damage but
> the linux one will need a total re-install

I have maintained over 100 production Linux systems over the years
(since 1995 on corporate networks).  I have never, ever had to
re-install.  Same goes for BSD (which I've used limitedly since 1995
as well).  [ Side note:  I've been an NT administrator even longer
(1992-1999), and re-installs are a fact of life (not as bad as Win9x
-- but I find NTFS will destroy itself after 2-3 years of good use
when it "assumes" a journal flush is good). ]

Now I know you are _trying_ to "stress" the fact that most Linux
distributions don't come with a "journaling filesystem", but the
default, Linux Ext2 filesystem is quite a reliable filesystem,
despite its simplicity.  In fact, of all the major UFS (UNIX
Filesystems), it fragments the least (although fragmentation on any
UFS not even close to being as bad as any Windows OS).

> We did have exclusively linux in our servers but since the changeover to
> FreeBSD the uptimes have increased to the point where machines
> generally keep going constantly from one upgrade til the next ... usually
> a year or so later. The Redhat / Slackware / Debian systems rarely went
> for a month before something or other broke. We do have the odd Win2000
> Server system (required for certain software applications) & their uptime
> is generally superior to linux ..... no comparison with BSD though.

Everyone's going to have their own comments.  My main Linux-based
Samba-NFS file server (which also does mail, CVS and everything else
under the sun) for over 50 NT, Solaris and Linux clients is running
RedHat 6.2 with kernel 2.2.16+Ext3+NFS3.  Crash recovery times are
<<5 minutes -- but I've only seen that happen once.  It stays up
forever (until stupid Florida Power goes down).

"Denis J. Cirulis" wrote:
> I don't want to claim BSD or Linux, I must say I'm using both BSD
> and Linux about 5 years.

Same boat.  No bigotry.

> You're wrong about power failures: first you can switch to
> ReiserFS and after power failure you wouldn't be asked to do
> fsck. Journaling FS rocks, but I haven't seen any for FreeBSD.

ReiserFS has issues as an NFS server.  Regardless, I have extensive
knowledge of Ext3 on *PRODUCTION* systems.  I'm also moving into
using XFS (I repackage their kernels from CVS in RPM format) since
Ext3 doesn't run on 2.4.  XFS is a pretty advanced system.

I recently did a presentation on Linux JFS options (focus on Ext3
and XFS).  You can find it here:

http://www.smithconcepts.com/files/presentations/ELUG_JFS_2001Mar05a.pdf

> One I must say that *BSD under heavy load are more powerfull.

That's the power of its mature VM and scheduler systems.  Linux is
getting there.  Linux 2.4 really improves _a_lot_.  Linus is getting
good at balancing simplicity and single-user performance against
server/multiuser performance.

-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
   Engineering/SysAdmin, Theseus Logic, Inc.
   Contributing Author, "Samba Unleashed"
   [ Note:  One chapter was the "Samba Unleashed" appendix on BSD
;-P ]

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