Re: [Toolserver-l] operating systems and web servers
hi river
i know we have talkedabout this before, but for the benefit of other users, let
me ask the obvious question: why FreeBSD and not Linux?
-- daniel
On 07.06.2011 04:04, River Tarnell wrote:
Hi,
So, this is not an announcement of any intent to change anything, I just
want to get an idea of how people feel about two things we could,
perhaps, change in the future:
1. ZWS to Apache on the web server
2. Solaris to FreeBSD on login servers
#2 depends on #1, so it seems sensible to discuss both together.
I don't have any strong opinion about either of these myself, but I
would like to hear what users think.
ZWS to Apache:
I know it annoyed people when we moved from Apache to ZWS initially,
because rewrite rules had to be redone, some .htaccess stuff stopped
working, etc. At the time we were using mod_suphp for per-user (suexec)
PHP scripts, and it was extremely inefficient; the system spent most of
its time doing nothing. ZWS allowed us to fix the problem cheaply (no
new hardware required), and I think for most users it worked just the
same.
Since then, two things have changed: firstly, Apache with mod_fcgid now
has decent FastCGI support, and with only a little work could be made to
support suexec PHP as well. Secondly, ZWS is now in maintenance, and
won't see any further development (so it might be better to switch now,
rather than wait until one month before ZWS support ends entirely and be
forced to switch).
With that in mind, it makes sense to consider moving back to Apache.
The main downside is that rewrite rules would have to be converted back
to Apache format (mod_rewrite). OTOH, .htaccess features missing from
ZWS would be available again (I don't know if anyone actually needs
this, but I believe at least a few users have complained about missing
features.)
Solaris to FreeBSD:
Of the two changes, I think this one would actually be the less
disruptive. For users, nearly everything would stay the same: we
already provide the GNU userland ('ls', etc) by default (and would
continue to do so) and the third-party software in /opt/ts would be
identical, as would cronie, SGE, Perl/Python/..., etc.
Software-wise, since nothing would really change, I don't see any
particular advantages for users. Disadvantages: 'ps -eaf' would stop
working ;-) and anyone with locally-compiled software (C/C++, or XS Perl
modules, etc.) would need to recompile them.
For us (admins), the main advantage is reduced maintenance overhead:
FreeBSD releases a new minor version about once a year, and supports
each for 2 years; each release branch only gets very infrequent updates
for security or errata. In comparison, there is a new Solaris update
every 6 months, and during yesterday's maintenance we installed 358 (!)
separate patches. Oracle doesn't provide a security-updates-only
release, and it's difficult to mix-and-match patches (e.g. to only get
security patches).
This doesn't directly affect users, but fewer OS changes should lead to
less lengthy / disruptive maintenance and less frequent reboots. OTOH,
I don't know if this has a noticeable impact on users at the moment, and
the previous maintenance was the first for ~170 days.
- river.
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Re: [Toolserver-l] operating systems and web servers
(Take with some grains of salt: never used FreeBSD or Solaris shells myself and am not a ts-admin. Also, this is a cell phone and I shouldn't even be awake now!) Also, what do you lose with FreeBSD? so far I can think of: * zfs dedupe * there's no longer a single goto company to get support from (guessing...) so you lose that annual cost but it may be non trivial to find the right hacker to find/fix a problem in an emergency. of course much of that support is likely to come for free (a guess) * you're still a different platform from the rest of wikimedia (basically the foundation) and so lose economy of scale * you mentioned SGE would still be available but it may be unmaintained (last I checked its enwp article, it said oracle was close sourcing it) just to keep in mind, I wouldn't stay just for SGE things you lose with linux vs. FreeBSD: * zfs is gone and (assuming lvm2 + traditional RAID vs. zfs) generally thin storage provisioning and snapshotting is much more limited and wasteful and fragile/more room for error. also most storage expansions will end up w/ transition periods that have *no* redundancy. * zones/jails I haven't kept up with the status in the last ~8 months but debian-kfreebsd may have matured enough to warrant a look. (See #debian-kbsd on oftc) -Jeremy On Jun 7, 2011 2:58 AM, Daniel Kinzler dan...@brightbyte.de wrote: ___ Toolserver-l mailing list (Toolserver-l@lists.wikimedia.org) https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/toolserver-l Posting guidelines for this list: https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Mailing_list_etiquette
Re: [Toolserver-l] operating systems and web servers
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Daniel Kinzler: why FreeBSD and not Linux? Why Linux and not FreeBSD, or Solaris, or OpenServer, or MP-RAS, or ...? I've asked this many times in the past (usually when someone says I want Linux) and never had a real answer that I can remember.[0] The way I see it, choice of operating system has very little impact on users because users don't, generally, interact with the operating system. There are a few specific cases which make a difference (I can think of cron, 'ps' and top/prstat), but apart from that, the software users actually use is the stuff in /opt/ts, which is independent of operating system.[1] For servers other than login servers (like databases) there are additional considerations, since those make a lot more use of OS features, like storage management. I've previously considered and rejected FreeBSD for use as a database server (in favour of staying with Solaris + VxVM). To me, FreeBSD seems to be an ideal candidate for a platform to layer /opt/ts on top of: it provides a base operating system which is reliable, has a good feature set in areas which only the OS can provide (e.g. DTrace, ZFS, auditing), and it's simple to install and maintain. - river. [0] I know some people are concerned about use of proprietary software on the Toolserver, but that's a separate issue, and in any case FreeBSD and Linux are equally open source. [1] This assumes that all the software we provide works on FreeBSD, of course. I haven't verified this, because we provide ~650 packages and it would take many hours, so there's no point doing it unless we actually decide to change OS. However, I don't foresee any problems. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (SunOS) iEYEARECAAYFAk3t5ikACgkQIXd7fCuc5vLokACfUbRk0fIc6yU6tdXaS+oTr26/ 0G8AoMGuJ149lizDh9KMO426taRJVDr8 =Hom2 -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Toolserver-l mailing list (Toolserver-l@lists.wikimedia.org) https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/toolserver-l Posting guidelines for this list: https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Mailing_list_etiquette
[Toolserver-l] Two Python libraries
While testing a way to convert it.source texts into ePub format, a friend asked me to know if genshi http://genshi.edgewall.org/wiki/Download and lxml http://pypi.python.org/pypi/lxml/ (python libraries) are already installed and usable into toolserver. I told him that I didn't know... and even if I knew that they are installed, I had no idea about their access and use. I browsed a little into toolserver wiki, but I didn't find anything about shared python libraries. Can I have some help and direction by you? Thanks! Alex brollo http://pypi.python.org/pypi/lxml/ ___ Toolserver-l mailing list (Toolserver-l@lists.wikimedia.org) https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/toolserver-l Posting guidelines for this list: https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Mailing_list_etiquette
