A lot of folks, such as Nate here, have been saying that Linux rarely
crashes.
That's true, some of the time. However, I've got a machine I've had to
reboot
twice a day from hard lockups (kernal panics) for the past week... and it
was
down for the last month before that. I have another machine that had been
up continuous for 170 days, no reboots needed (last reboot before that was
from a power failure). After shutting down for Y2K, it didn't come up (ok,
it was a harddrive failure... we talked about that last week). I had to
rebuild the system from scratch, but it's locked up twice in the past week
(same day). I've played a bit with the configuration, and it's not locked
up in 4 days, but.....
So, no, there are still some bugs in Linux. The difference is this, though.
Linus was up continuous for 170 days. Pigpen had been up 100 (power
failure,
again, but different circuit). Woodstock has been up now for a week (except
for one power down to close up the case), since I got my two nic setup
working.
Various other Linux boxes have been up continuous/semi-continuous for a
while.
I'm having problems on TWO machines, one of which was problem free up to 2
weeks
ago... out of a dozen. And these are not high quality parts (all of them
are rejects, has beens, and trash pile recoveries.... Woodstock and Pigpen
are 133 MHz Pentiums, Linus is a 200 MHz PPro, and the others are all 100MHz
Pentiums...
I use Linux (and RH in particular) because it's the best tool for what I
need:
X-Workstations, highly configurable, robust, fairly quick, relatively
feature
rich, OR stripped down UNIX compute nodes for a Beowulf Cluster Computer.
NT doesn't let me do that.
Bill Ward
-----Original Message-----
From: Nate Waddoups [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2000 10:26 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: recipient.list.not.shown; @nswcphdn.navy.mil
Subject: Re: Opinions
On Tue, 11 Jan 2000, Jeremy Bradley wrote:
> Please do not take this as a flame, I am serious about this. I would like
> to hear opinions of why users of this list are so happy with Redhat
compared
> to Microsoft.
The four things that mean the most to me, personally:
1: It gives me a way to get mileage out of old PCs that Gates would like
us all to think of as doorstops because they will never, ever, run a
Microsoft operating system other than DOS at an acceptable speed.
2: It never crashes. At least I haven't seen it crash yet in the five
years I've been using it. Not counting the day I made a shell script that
called itself recursively - and even that was before I realized that
"killall thatdamnscript.sh" would have saved me.
3: It supports multiple concurrent users.
4: Complete remote administration. I confess to adding ssh for security,
but even without it, you can address pretty much any system configuration
problem from pretty much anywhere, up to an including a reboot. Just
don't hose up your networking config if you're further away than the next
room. :-) I'm still waiting for command-line replacement of NICs, video
cards, faulty hard drives, and the like, but NT doesn't have that either.
(and 5: Linux and its cousins use /forward/slashes/ instead of \backward\.
I was at a computer shop the other day snickering at three adjacent
'ergonomic' keyboards, each of which put the backslash key in a different
location, all inaccessible without a hand contortion or a brief
abandonment of 'home row.' Meanwhile, all three had the forward slash
located just under the typist's right pinky.)
I run a small ISP just for grins. There are maybe ten users, three of
whom use it every day and two more of whom use it every few days. Until
about a year ago, we were all hosted from a 486/33 with two 200MB disks
and 24MB of RAM. For two, maybe three years, this little box did SMTP,
POP3, HTTP, FTP, DNS, various other acronyms, and a couple of us ran Pine
on it via telnet to read email.
Try that with Microsoftware. :-)
I recently moved everything to a whopping big Pentium 90 (not Pentium III,
not II, not even Pro, just Pentium 90) with 14GB disk space and 64MB RAM.
Pine is a little snappier, I have space for my budding collection of
homebrew MPEGs, and if the disks fail I can replace them with
currently-available new drives.
The 486 is destined for firewall duty elsewhere, so we won't all have to
spend quite so much time waiting for the NT Proxy Server to reboot for one
reason or another. The 486 probably wouldn't know what to do with a disk
bigger than 400MB, but if the disks crap out, I'll boot from floppy and
NFS. This is the cheapest firewall solution I could think of. We were
using a similar box on our T1 at work to great effect for a couple years.
(65-120 employees, depending on how far back you look look, and to be
honest I think we could just use a half-T1 and still not clog the pipe)
> I downloaded RH 6.1 and installed it on the second drive of my 200 MMX
> at home. I found it to be a little tricky configuring things such as
> the internet connection and such.
Installation is my biggest gripe... even been through the process 4-5
times at least, and I still hate it. Some of the complexity is a natural
side effect of the large feature set, but still... I would be nice if you
could go forward and backward through the installation 'wizard' screens
without having to retype stuff all the time.
And the linux hardware compatibility list is still small, compared to
microsoft's. That's changing, but I don't expect parity anytime soon.
> I am sure if I had a little UNIX background it wouldn't have been that
> bad. I had though that most users went to Linux to get away from
> Microsoft bugs and patches and all of that crap, but now after being
> on the lists I see that users are constantly adding patches and
> recompiling kernels and such. Is this type the type of stuff that has
> to be done, or is this mostly just the little hacker and developer
> type things?
I think your perceptions are skewed by the sample group you're looking at.
Many of the people who post to the lists are probably linux enthusiasts,
who see such things as opportunities to play with their toys, not as
hassles that impede their progress toward some other goal. I myself fall
in the middle. I don't mind recompiling, I even prefer .tgz distributions
to .rpm, but still wish I could have had added NFS with a command line
trick instead of a kernel rebuild.
I don't bother with patches except in the case of security issues - Linux
and MS seem to be on par with each other there, with Linux having a small
advantage perhaps (owing to the longer history of recreational hacking on
open source).
> What would be the next step? You guys start talking about configuring
> modules and compiling kernels, it makes my head hurt and makes me want
> to run back to my NT server! I don't think I could compile a kernel
> to save my life!
You'd be surprise how easy it is. Run 'make menuconfig,' pick the
features you want, run 'make zdisk,' pop in a fresh floppy disk, get a
sandwich, boot from the floppy. I have a working kernel on my hard drive
as a backup, but boot from floppy by default.
> (But I can install the hell out of some service packs on NT <grin>).
> I would like to hear everyones opinions and....please don't laugh at
> me for being Linux dumb :-)
No worries. Very few of us were born with this knowledge. :-)
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