Any serious production servers yet?

[Danial Thom]

--- Matthew Dillon <dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

>     I couldn't have put it better myself.
> 
>     Vis-a-vie network performance, my goal for
> DragonFly is to have 'good'
>     performance.  But I think it is a complete
> waste of time to try to
>     squeeze every last erg out of the network
> subsystem like FreeBSD has.
>     We aren't trying to compete with Cisco, and
> nobody in their right mind
>     would take a turnkey BSD or linux-based
> system over a Cisco (or other
>     piece of high-end networking gear) to route
> multi-gigabits/sec of
>     traffic.   I still think we can get close
> to FreeBSD's rated performance,
>     eventually, but I am not willing to create
> a mess of hacks and crazy
>     configuration options to turn DragonFly
> into the ultimate ether switch
>     when I can purchase one off the shelf for a
> few hundred bucks.
> 
>     I think the last time I tried to use a
> general purpose UNIX OS as an
>     actual 'router' was in 1994.  We used two
> BSDi boxes (and later FreeBSD
>     boxes) to route the two T1's that BEST
> Internet had when we had just 
>     started up.  It was a horror, frankly. 
> Hardware bugs in the ethernet
>     cards and even in the T1 card required a
> lot of hacking to work around,
>     and trying to run BGP with gated was even
> worse.
> 
>     Back then 'real' networking hardware was
> bulky and expensive.  Today,
>     though, there is no excuse.  It's cheap
> (and even cheaper on E-Bay),
>     and far more reliable then a general
> purpose PC.  
> 
>     If someone is trying to route
> multi-gigabits worth of traffic then
>     the infrastructure is clearly important
> enough to warrent purchasing
>     dedicated networking gear.  If someone
> isn't trying to go all out, 
>     then a general purpose OS might be
> adequate, if still not as reliable.
> 
>     So all I can say to Mr Thom in that regard
> is: Stop trying to fit a
>     square peg into a round hole and just buy
> the appropriate gear for your
>     network infrastructure needs.
> 
> 						-Matt
> 
> 

Your caveman-like views are as troubling as they
are entertaining. You seem to have no grasp of
the modern world and no understanding of 'BSDs
niche. Everything was buggy in '94, but with you
and clowns like Paul Borman trying to do
networking, what the hell would you expect no
matter what you had to work with?  :)))

Many, many large network appliances (load
balancers, bandwidth managers, firewalls,
security filters) are based on linux or BSD. The
reason is that CISCOs and "mega-gigabit routers"
have no extra CPU power to do things like
filtering and shaping at a very high level. I've
made myself many millons of $$ selling a few
thousand network devices, which is more than
you'll ever make having a really cool desktop OS,
even if its better than anything else out there.
Designing a product for fun is one thing, but if
you want to get funding you have to produce
something that's useful for the corporate world,
not for a bunch of pimply-faced college kids. The
reality of the corporate world is that even if
DFLY is the best damned OS ever written, they
will use windows or linux, because you can't
staff a support center with DFLY experts. Its
simply never going to happen. You can however get
in as a server platform, because only a couple of
guys have to know what they're doing.

Unix as a desktop box is not even an
afterthought. 'BSDs niche is as a network server.
Period.

You might think its a waste of time to optimize
networking, but it seems to me you're wasting
your time entirely if your goal is to be a little
faster than LINUX as a desktop box. Who cares?
FreeBSD with 1 processor is faster than linux
with 2, but no-one used FreeBSD anyway. Nobody
wants to use 'BSD as a desktop machine, except
for a handful of people with a lot more time on
their hands than the rest of us. People want to
use 'BSD as network servers. People in the real
world that is. Maybe thats why your not with
FreeBSD anymore; your refusal to modernize your
ideas to what's going on in the real world, and
your complete lack of understanding where the
dollars are to fund your efforts?


DT


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