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Miscellaneous => The Lounge => Topic started by: toadlife on 10 June 2005, 11:35

Title: Check out my new uber server
Post by: toadlife on 10 June 2005, 11:35
At work we surplused out an old server. Instead of tossing it in the trash, I decided to take it home. It's a Pentium Pro 200/64MB RAM/9GB Quantum 10KRPM SCSI 160 drive. Not exactly a screamer, but it will do as a test web dev server.

My beast:  http://toadlife.kicks-ass.net   :D
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: solemnwarning on 10 June 2005, 15:29
What distro, Debian 3.1 (sarge) rules the servers :)
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: toadlife on 10 June 2005, 20:41
FreeBSD 5.4
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: Aloone_Jonez on 10 June 2005, 20:56
solemnwarning , couldn't you tell toadlife is a BSD bitch, isn't his avatar enough to show his opinion that BSD is better than Linux? :D

A good friend of mine share the same opinion but I prefur Linux as it's easier to use even though BSD may be technically better.
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: toadlife on 10 June 2005, 21:30
Quote from: Aloone_Jonez
solemnwarning , couldn't you tell toadlife is a BSD bitch, isn't his avatar enough to show his opinion that BSD is better than Linux? :D

That's BSD fanboy. linux is BSD's bitch. :D:D
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: Kintaro on 19 June 2005, 08:25
Aloone Jonez I think you made a typo

"Technically Better" is suposed to read "Technically Behind"
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: toadlife on 19 June 2005, 10:10
Quote from: kintaro
Aloone Jonez I think you made a typo

"Technically Better" is suposed to read "Technically Behind"

But then it would incorrect.
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: Kintaro on 19 June 2005, 15:35
Quote from: toadlife
But then it would incorrect.

 How is BSD technically better?
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: toadlife on 20 June 2005, 01:20
MUCH Better security record

Why?

linux: 19 security vulns in the 2.6.11 kernel since April 6, 2005
FreeBSD: 10 Security vulns in the entire 5.4-RELEASE since April 14, 2005 (3 in just the kernel)
OpenBSD: 6 security vulns in the entire 3.6-RELEASE since April 1, 2005 (


More stable

why?

This is purely anecdotal, but what the hell:
* BSD's owns virtualy all of the longest uptimes at netcraft
* Your linux box has crashed at least one more time (http://www.microsuck.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9152) than my BSD box has in the past month :p

Faster TCP stack

Why?

FreeBSD has consistently been shown to outperform linux under high networking loads. linux has improved in this area drastically with the advent of the 2.6 kernel


Better integrated firewalls (pf/ipfw2)

Why?

They are every bit as functional, and perform better then ipchains. The syntax of both ipfw2 and pf syntax is MUCH easier to learn than iptables. I've seen my share of iptables scripts..they are scary...I could impliment them in half the lines with ipfw2.


Slightly better file System:

UFS2 supports MUCH larger file sizes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems) and volumes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems) over any linux filesystem.

Also, the BSD's have featured fault tolerant file systems (resitant to power failures/hard resets) many years before linux did.
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: mobrien_12 on 20 June 2005, 01:34
Quote from: toadlife
MUCH Better security record

Why?

linux: 19 security vulns in the 2.6.11 kernel since April 6, 2005
FreeBSD: 10 Security vulns in the entire 5.4-RELEASE since April 14, 2005 (3 in just the kernel)
OpenBSD: 6 security vulns in the entire 3.6-RELEASE since April 1, 2005 (



I gotta agree with that.  I'm starting to get  seriously annoyed at the need to download a new kernel every six weeks or so to keep very serious kernel level security vulnerabilities off of my box.  In contrast, the FreeBSD partition had only a DoS vulnerability in it's kernel.

I don't agree much with your other points though, and the fault tolerant file system argument might have been true many years ago but not any more since there are many journaling file systems available now.
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: toadlife on 20 June 2005, 01:46
..but of course, I must concede that linux is techically better than BSD on the desktop.
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: toadlife on 20 June 2005, 01:49
Quote from: mobrien_12
I gotta agree with that. I'm starting to get seriously annoyed at the need to download a new kernel every six weeks or so to keep very serious kernel level security vulnerabilities off of my box. In contrast, the FreeBSD partition had only a DoS vulnerability in it's kernel.

I don't agree much with your other points though, and the fault tolerant file system argument might have been true many years ago but not any more since there are many journaling file systems available now.

Yeah ex3fs and resierfs seem to be pretty good. They still can't touch UFS2 on maximum file/voume size though. :D
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: Kintaro on 20 June 2005, 12:17
So what, on volumes that size we can still use XFS, does freeBSD support anything as cool as XFS?

Linux:
* SELinux, providing far more advanced security than even ACL's offer.
* DeviceMapper, providing lots of advantges with filesystem volumes, including crypto and other things, that are bloody difficult to use in freebsd.
* Simple things like cryptoloop.
* More commercial backing.

As for vulnerabilites, they are not usually that severe, and at least they're noticed.

As far as security is concerned, SELinux provides a more advanced approach than any other availible operating system as far as I know.

Note with proformance: Linux has great improvements with premtpive kernel support compiled, otherwise it runs a great deal slower. I have not seen any benchmarks between a recent Linux and a recent FreeBSD release. However I am sure the difference would only be minor

I used to use FreeBSD and it was pretty good. Only thing is keeping the system up to date was a pain, I didn't understand ports that well in that respect. With Fedora its pretty simple when you use apt, and since I don't have a high network load at home, nor do I have massive file volumes, Linux's simplicity is hard to beat. In other words: FreeBSD still offers me nothing.
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: toadlife on 20 June 2005, 19:20
Quote from: kintaro
So what, on volumes that size we can still use XFS, does freeBSD support anything as cool as XFS?

Woah. I missed that one. XFS looks pretty cool. As for FreeBSD, it's not supported YET (http://people.freebsd.org/%7Erodrigc/xfs/).

Quote
As far as security is concerned, SELinux provides a more advanced approach than any other availible operating system as far as I know.

Yeah, but does anyone use SELinux? I've never run accross anyone who has.

Quote
Note with proformance: Linux has great improvements with premtpive kernel support compiled, otherwise it runs a great deal slower. I have not seen any benchmarks between a recent Linux and a recent FreeBSD release. However I am sure the difference would only be minor

I've seen one recent benchmark. FreeBSD 5.2 vs linux 2.4/2.6. the results were a wash. I would love to see the benchmarks done with 5.4 though, as FreeBSD was undergoing some massive kernel changes between 4.x and 5.x and the early 5.x releases performance suffered a bit as a result.

Quote
I used to use FreeBSD and it was pretty good. Only thing is keeping the system up to date was a pain, I didn't understand ports that well in that respect.

Yes, keeping ports up to date can be a bitch.

There is a fairly new utility called portmanager, which I've been using for two months now. It makes keeping your ports up to date as easy as running one command.

Quote
With Fedora its pretty simple when you use apt, and since I don't have a high network load at home, nor do I have massive file volumes, Linux's simplicity is hard to beat. In other words: FreeBSD still offers me nothing.

Well it does offer you one more choice, that isn't Windows. ;)
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: Kintaro on 20 June 2005, 21:30
Fedora Core 3 ships with SELinux, and its almost a defualt option in the installer. Anyone running Fedora Core 3 who does not realise the option of running SELinux is either blind or just stupid. I run with SELinux. So you have run across someone now.

http://kintaro.noobify.com/drupal/pub/images/Screenshots/SELinux.png (http://kintaro.noobify.com/drupal/pub/images/Screenshots/SELinux.png)

I run CVS to keep my ports upto date on my OpenBSD machine. However how do I just upgrade the ports I have installed automatically? I have no idea. (I should be writing this into the OpenBSD mailing list, as you run FreeBSD)
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: Kintaro on 20 June 2005, 21:33
Note: I own a very expensive book on doing nearly everything with FreeBSD (except for flying me to Alpha Centurai, which I hear is upcoming in the next release).
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: Siplus on 20 June 2005, 22:32
Quote
Yeah, but does anyone use SELinux? I've never run accross anyone who has.


Fedora Core 3 and 4 has SELinux active by default (or at least 4 does... 3 might just ask, but i think is on be default if you have the firewall on be default)

I'm unsure about other distros, as i mostly deal with fedora
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: toadlife on 20 June 2005, 22:53
Quote from: kintaro
Fedora Core 3 ships with SELinux, and its almost a defualt option in the installer. Anyone running Fedora Core 3 who does not realise the option of running SELinux is either blind or just stupid. I run with SELinux. So you have run across someone now.

http://kintaro.noobify.com/drupal/pub/images/Screenshots/SELinux.png (http://kintaro.noobify.com/drupal/pub/images/Screenshots/SELinux.png)

OKay, linux has BSD beat in this area, but all hope is not lost for the BSD faithfull:

http://www.trustedbsd.org/ (http://www.trustedbsd.org/)

Quote from: kintaro
I run CVS to keep my ports upto date on my OpenBSD machine. However how do I just upgrade the ports I have installed automatically? I have no idea. (I should be writing this into the OpenBSD mailing list, as you run FreeBSD)

CVS does not keep your installed ports up to date. It keeps your ports tree up to date. The ports tree is simply the files that allow you to install ports. As for OpenBSD, the procedure for updating ports sucks compared to FreeBSD.

With FreeBSD you can do it maually (fuck that!),or use portupgrade or portmanager. Both portupgrade and portmanager check your installed ports against the current ports tree and update the ones that are out of date. They also detect dependency conflicts and resolve them without breaking things - and beleive it or not, it works very well. Unless you have a very small amount of ports installed, updating your ports manually is a nightmare, as dependency hell (similar to the "RPM hell" that plagued many RPM distros a few years ago) will drive you nuts. As I said, I use portmanager. THe only drawback to portmanager is that it only updates ports from the source. portupgrade has the ability to use pre-compiled packages only, which of course speeds things up immensely. Of course packages are generally take longer to become avaialable, so you have to wait awhile longer to get non-security related updates.

With OpenBSD, there is no equivalent to portupgrade/portmanager, so updating ports is pretty much has to be done manually, which sucks.
 :thumbdwn:http://www.openbsd.org/ports.html (http://www.openbsd.org/ports.html)
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: toadlife on 20 June 2005, 22:54
Quote from: kintaro
Note: I own a very expensive book on doing nearly everything with FreeBSD (except for flying me to Alpha Centurai, which I hear is upcoming in the next release).

When you get to Alpha Centurai, say hello to Richard Stallman for me.
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: toadlife on 20 June 2005, 23:01
FYI: the procedure I go through to update all of my ports on FreeBSD goes like this:


# portsnap update
# portmanager -u

portsnap is an alternative to cvs for syching the ports tree. It used compressed snapshots, is encryption, and is much faster than traditional CVS updating.

portmanager carries out the updates automagically.

I've even heard that there are GUI ftonends for all of these tools. I've never tried them though.
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: Kintaro on 20 June 2005, 23:11
I might install FreeBSD on my useless Server (useless because it runs Windows 2003, which is very nice, but i dont have anything to use it for).
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: Aloone_Jonez on 21 June 2005, 00:36
[OFFTOPIC]kintaro,
I like your new avatar, where did you get it from?

Do you think OS bashing avatars will be the next big thing?
toadlife, you may've started a new trend here! :D
[/OFFTOPIC]
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: Kintaro on 21 June 2005, 01:09
Quote from: Aloone_Jonez
[OFFTOPIC]kintaro,
I like your new avatar, where did you get it from?

Do you think OS bashing avatars will be the next big thing?
toadlife, you may've started a new trend here! :D
[/OFFTOPIC]

 http://images.google.com.au/images?biw=&q=bsd+linux&hl=en&btnG=Search+Images
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: MrX on 21 June 2005, 05:13
your server is very robust. I held down alt+r in netpositive for about 2 minutes of continuous requesting and it held up great.

Mr X
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: toadlife on 21 June 2005, 05:34
heh. I've thought about installing webbench on the server and putting the client on about 30 machines at work and benchmarking it....then installing a linux distro with the same version of apache and doing the same.

Would be interesting to see which OS does better with really slow ass hardware.
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: Kintaro on 21 June 2005, 06:01
I think you should get me to install Linux on it to make sure things are fair :).
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: toadlife on 21 June 2005, 19:14
Quote from: kintaro
I think you should get me to install Linux on it to make sure things are fair :).

With the wonders of ssh, that could be arranged.
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: Kintaro on 22 June 2005, 04:09
It would be fun. I would just need an install of http://www.trustix.org 2.2, and then I would just need to compile a kernel and shizzle, play with apache config, etc.
Title: Re: Check out my new uber server
Post by: solemnwarning on 22 June 2005, 12:25
the linux box better be same speed as the bsd ;)