Posts tagged FreeBSD
The dilemma – OS updates vs OS type
Aug 28th
For years I have been a FreeBSD bigot. I love FreeBSD, the stability, performance, ease of use, and steady progression.
But…
Updates are kind of a chore, there is no such thing as true incremental updates, you either do patch updates against RELEASE, or you do world updates against STABLE. I am a STABLE kind of admin so my updates take quite a few man hours to do. The number of security updates required for FreeBSD is quite minimal (the target is small).
The Ubuntu Linux distribution does do things incrementally, you can update whenever you wish as by default everything is distributed as binaries. The downside is the constant updates that are in the pipeline and no easy way to figure out which update is relevant to what type of thing you are updating for. The update mailing lists are high speed, high volume, and I don’t have enough time in my day to keep up. The number of security updates required for any Linux distribution is very large (the target is huge).
And this has nothing to do with package maintenance…
Linux Distributions vs PHP
Mar 24th
The splintering of Linux distributions seems to be continuing!
This week, I have had requests for PHP versions 5.3 and 5.2 on both Red Hat EL 5 and CentOS 5 – though never distribution supports higher than 5.1.6 in the official repositories.
PHP 5.2 has been out quite a while. Ubuntu Hardy LTS has it and it is 2 years old. Ubuntu Lucid LTS is coming out in April has 5.3 by default. I bet Debian Lenny is at 5.2 or higher already. SUSE is at 5.3 (for version 11.x where X != 0)
“Why” seems to be the question of the day – why doesn’t RHEL do some updates to something people feel they ‘require’ for their PHP web applications? CentOS would then follow.
Even old/stodgy FreeBSD (my personal favorite) is all over the 5.2 camp for PHP since 6.x, and the *BSD people do not play the version of the day.
If I have to run Linux based systems, I choose Ubuntu. Not always the latest version but at least this distribution keeps up with customer wants (and sometimes…needs).
Example cost: Virtual Private Cloud (updated)
Feb 10th
Back in September, 2009, I had written a post with a quick overview of what a private cloud (or infrastructure) looks like and some basic costs and information, including why it is a great product (I am biased).
Since then, Dell has retired the PE2900III model server and items change, this is an update for the basic configuration.
Reminder graphic:
2 Servers, 1 firewall
So, originally, the physical servers were configured as:
- Dell PE2900III (reasonably priced, very reliable, I have spares on the shelf)
- 4 ethernet ports (2 built in, 2 port card installed, more can be added)
- 2 73GB SAS drives mirrored together for booting VMware vSphere 4
- 32GB RAM (48GB is max for this hardware platform)
New servers look like:
- Dell PET610 (reasonable price, very reliable, spares to go onto the shelf)
- 4 ethernet ports (all built in)
- 2 80GB SATA drives mirrored together for booting VMware vSphere 4
- 48GB RAM (192GB max available – very expensive)
The reason for the RAM change is that I am seeing a 2:1 (or higher) ratio of RAM to CPU usage in terms of percentage, and 48GB is a good place for this sized system. Also, the newer Xeon 55xx series processors uses RAM sticks in 3s instead of 2 or 4 at a time. 48GB is 12 4GB sticks of RAM. The newer 55xx series of processors also has working hyper-threading (or H/T) and I am seeing very nice performance on servers deployed using this processor family in our network.
Cost difference? The original posting listed had estimated the cost at $1,600.00 per month (see previous post), and I estimate this to be very close, inching up to approximately $1,700.00 per month, and this number should be high. (for accurate pricing, please contact ipHouse sales people, they can run up a quote based on real numbers)
Shell service available
Jan 29th
Been a long week and I had to deal with some red tape internally (of my own creation!), but finally have some working shell service to sell to people who want it.
I had posted last week about the issue(s) of shell services and decided that I would do the work to put this kind of service together as I have both the experience and gumption to do so. Even includes my smiley, happy-go-lucky support attitude!
So it is available and sales is ready to take the orders. I don’t expect a lot of people signing up for this, but it takes care of a sect of customers that still want to do things in a manner that isn’t web based, that isn’t all mouse driven.
I can relate to that!
- Ubuntu Hardy
- FreeBSD 8
- emacs, vi, joe
- mutt (no elm, no pine – all Maildir oh well)
- procmail filtering
- IMAP, POP3, SMTP, with SSL and STARTTLS goodness
- reasonable and ample disk storage quota on our NetApp gear
Let the nerding begin!
UNIX Shell services, what’s the fuss?
Jan 21st
Wowzers, quite a little thread going on in a newsgroup, but really, what’s the big deal?
I think I know…
Not everyone uses the Internet for viewing web pages and downloading pr0nself-help videos and television shows. The Internet itself has become much easier for the layman to use, and with that, these historical services are no longer needed and support for them is harder and harder to come by.
In the past, most service providers (especially the ISPs that service residential users) used to offer some kind of UNIX shell for their paying clientele. Over time, the number of service providers has decreased, and of those that are left, the percentage of them that offer this type of environment has decreased by orders of magnitude. I’ll speculate on why further down this post.
UNIX shells are fascinating experiments in shared computing resources with a very long history.
