[Gllug] just a quick question

[Nix]

On Wed, 15 Feb 2006, Bruce Richardson wrote:
> Commercial Unices are often a shock to Linux users because the userspace
> tools are crufty, the filesystem layout deeply eccentric and so on.
> These are things that are buffed to a nice shine in the free *nix world,

Indeed.

> At random, a few ways in which the commercial Unices outperform free
> software:
> 
> 	Resilience: Linux falls over under high load where most of the
> 	commercial products will just suck it up.

Much of this is because the proprietary Unixes tend to run on *better
hardware* than the Linuxes do. It's rare to have a Sun or an HP-UX
suffer major RAM or CPU or cooling problems (like I am now, and Linux
soldiers on, with the occasional daemon crash and many insane bugs, but
still it survives).

> 	Filesystem management: Linux LVM is very directly inspired by
> 	HP-UX LVM, for example, but the HP-UX version is still more
> 	robust and featureful.  Or look at IBM's GPFS, or Sun's ZFS.

The HP-UX version can do distributed LVM?

> 	Complex features shipped as standard:  Want Kerberos 5 user
> 	management or filesystem ACLs?  Solaris has these ready to go
> 	and heavily integrated.

Linux has filesystem ACLs integrated to an increasing degree these days
(but whether it's in any distros other than perhaps the latest Fedora or
Gentoo I don't know).

> Or just look at basic TCP/IP networking, which on Linux is more than a
> little eccentric.

Because it *does so much more* than commercial Unixes do. You can both
outfeature and outperform many expensive dedicated routers with a Linux
box and commodity network cards. (OK, well, sometimes you need *fast*
network cards. :) )

>                    And everybody knows (or should) that you are much
> better off running your NFS server on a commercial Unix if you have the
> capability.

This ceased to be true *years* ago. I've had no problems with
interoperability with the 2.6 knfsd, and only one minor problem in all
of the 2.4 series.

At work we use Linux boxes as the NFS servers and non-Linux boxes as the
clients, because the proprietary Unix+hardware vendors' disks are so
criminally expensive.

-- 
`... follow the bouncing internment camps.' --- Peter da Silva
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