*BSD News Article 47704


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From: iialan@iifeak.swan.ac.uk (Alan Cox)
Subject: Re: Internet service providing-which OS?
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References: <3uk3b5$35a@legend.txdirect.net> <DC3sEM.1Jr@saturn.tlug.org> <tgmDC46x0.A4M@netcom.com>
Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 15:02:09 GMT
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In article <tgmDC46x0.A4M@netcom.com> tgm@netcom.com (Thomas G. McWilliams) writes:
>FreeBSD ftp.cdrom.com crashed earlier this year and was down for over a
>week.  The fallout was catastrophic. Anyone who would be so foolish as
>to use FreeBSD as a mission critical server should ask the OS/2
>community which was schwacked hard by the loss of a major FTP site.

Being down for a week is nothing to do with system reliability. Thats down
and completely trashed during the 2.3->2,4 upgrade process. Wuarchive has
had crashes.

If your software crashes the worst you have to do with an ftp archive is 
restore the backup or mirror your archive back from a mirror site. If you
lose hardware its down to the vagueries of delivery and orders. At least
PC hardware is so cheap you can keep spare machines and still pay less than
for a Sun, and you can easily play swap the boards to cannibalise other
gear.

>was the cost to the Internet community? What would be the cost to your
>business to lose connectivity for a week? How "Free" is FreeBSD when

Huge, but you'd have to take out 6 ISDN lines, 2 network links, and in 
dire emergency a UUCP feed as well as about 8 PC's to achieve that. Since
that would probably take a bomb attack, its an acceptable current level of
risk.

>you factor in over a week of downtime? Face it, if you need 24 hour per
>day, 365 day per year reliability, FreeBSD will *NOT* cut it.

Nor will anything else built by man 

Alan

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 // Alan Cox  //  iialan@www.linux.org.uk   //  GW4PTS@GB7SWN.#45.GBR.EU  //
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