[thelist] (Intel + Linux) vs (Sun + Solaris)

[Judah McAuley]

> Linux should not even be considered, especially if
> reliability is one of your concerns.  My husband works
> at an ISP and is switching over their wireless towers
> from Linux to OpenBSD, because the Linux boxes kept
> crashing all the time.
>
> http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html
>
> Take a look at a listing of web servers with the longest
> up times.  A good majority are BSD boxes (notice that
> there are only 2 Linux servers on the top 50 list).

Linux always seemed reliable to me so these numbers seemed highly
suspicious.  So I looked at the FAQ and noticed a bunch of things that
make this report pretty useless.  Such as:

It's a self-selected sample so that the only hosts monitored are those
hosts that requested to be monitored.  These machines aren't comparable
by type of host (straight HTML, dynamic www, email, ftp, etc) or hosting
load both of which will have an effect on stability.

and...

Most versions of Linux reset their uptime count after 497 days.  That
itself would exclude Linux boxes from the top 50 even if they had been
up continuously for 1000 days

and...

That report measures uptime not availability. Uptime is reported time
since last reboot.  However if the service isn't responding then that
days data is just ignored in the stats.  The number one site, for
instance, with a reported uptime of 1241 days, shows only 44 sample
points since Nov 2001.  Since sites are queried once a day this means
that their web service has only answered 44 days out of the last 6
months.  It doesn't really matter to me if the machine is up if the
service I want to use isn't responding.

That being said, BSD is a great OS that I would recommend everyone look
into.  But just because one person has had problems with an OS doesn't
mean that we should tell other people to not even consider it.

Judah