DOlson Posted March 1, 2003 Author Report Share Posted March 1, 2003 aslan.narnia.com The Chronicles of Narnia-C.S. Lewis great books. They sure are. :) I like C.S. Lewis... I've read about the talks he and J.R.R. Tolkein had about God and Christianity. Interesting reading, let me tell you. :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest duir66 Posted March 2, 2003 Report Share Posted March 2, 2003 My 9.0 router/firewall has been up for 120 days since I unplugged it for hurricane. 76 straight before that. Ticked me off too because the power never dropped during the whole storm. router/firewall not as big a deal as server but I've seen Win98 crash because of a screen saver. Glad to see you back DOlsen. I think you guys misspell my name on purpose... I'm not "back" -- I've been posting quite often. Not my fault you don't check out the games forum. :P You should check out your math though dude. Mandrake 9.0 was released September 25th, which is what, 155 days ago, give or take? I'm not a mathematical genius, but... 155 - 120 - 76 = -41... So somehow, you go Mandrake 9.0 well over a month in advance? That doesn't seem right to me. :P Sorry for misspelling your name. No offense meant, and it was an honest mistake. As someone whos real name gets misspelled consistently, I feel for you. It won't happen again. I'm not a gamer. Just didn't see you elsewhere. All the same, its not my fault for you not posting elsewhere more frequently. :P Still glad you didn't quit posting altogether like you said you would. I'm up 123 days+ right now. This 123+76 uptime is not counting the few days in-between it didn't run. Allow me to be more specific. Hurricane Lili rolled through Gulf States around 9.21.02. Mandrake 9.0 was released 9.25.02. Before I brought it down I was running 8.2 on it for 76 days. Installed 9.0 when I brought it back up around September 28th according to my calculations. This thing runs so much, at the time I brought it back up I had to pluck the CPU fan in order to kick it off again properly. Time for a new HSF. Good ol' K6-2 :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DragonMage Posted March 2, 2003 Report Share Posted March 2, 2003 Old computers can be the best servers you can have, since they are cool running, requires you little fans / powersupply fans which in turn makes them quiet computers. I remember sleeping besides an old P2 computer, boy they are so quiet compared to today's jet engines.. Anyway, I think I am going to build that server out of my old Athlon TB 900 in a couple of weeks.. right after projects & homeworks.. All I need is just a floppy drive, CDROM and KVM switch... should cost much for all those.. I wonder how long can it last uptime wise. :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
qnr Posted March 2, 2003 Report Share Posted March 2, 2003 Anyone else operate on caffiene and strange pagan rituals? I used to, but I ran out of virgins to sacrifice.... ---------------- Incidently, I used to love the Chronicles of Narnia too, even if C.S. Lewis was a christian apologist :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MottS Posted March 24, 2003 Report Share Posted March 24, 2003 I no longer care what anyone says about Mandrake, as far as it's stability goes. If it can happily run on my server for that long, then it is stable enough Just one question. If people complains about Mdk stability, which distro is stable then? Just a question because I'm currently moving lots of files on my server with sftp, md5sum all those files with ssh while it is running Apache and sharing the net for 2 computers .. all that without complaining about anything. So if Mdk isn't stable, what is stable then? MOttS Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ramfree17 Posted March 24, 2003 Report Share Posted March 24, 2003 .. all that without complaining about anything. So if Mdk isn't stable, what is stable then? a stable is that roof thingy with horses in it. :#: joking aside, stability is another fuzzy word. it might be stable for you but not for me or the other way around. mandrake is (generally) a bleeding-edge distro that is remarkably stable for being such. we can all preach that mkd is stable but there will always be somebody who will refute it because it didnt work out for them (it might be because of user-error but that is another story). ciao! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aRTee Posted March 24, 2003 Report Share Posted March 24, 2003 Stability is a very vague term; but consensus seems to be it has to do with great uptime when talking about servers. For me, stability means the system doesn’t crash. I recently upgraded and had quite a few crashes due to system/hardware instability (overclocking trying to find the sweet spot; I’m back to the stock speed, was just wasting more time by trying to find that sweet spot vs gaining anything with a slightly faster system).... 99.99% uptime means nothing, as someone calculated that still means more than 50 minutes of downtime per year, and as a fast pc boots in a minute (or less, if you trim down the system well), that means 50 reboots, which means down about once a week. Think that 99.99% uptime spec may come from some wellknown software giant...... I like to think of a stable system as one that NEVER has to be rebooted unless you specifically instruct it to (for kernel updates or hardware changes or so), even when completely loaded. So never any unplanned downtime. Oh and then it starts counting how often you actually have to have planned downtime due to security patches... BTW: I hate to break it to you, DOlson, but your uptime proves nothing, since there wasn’t a high load ;) If I turn on my old win98 pc (that is sitting unused in a corner, any takers for an old p1 166MMX??) I’m quite sure it will stay up until the power fails, the hardware breaks or I turn it off... as long as I don’t do anything with it. Ok, exagerated example, but it’s about staying up through high loads for a longer time that shows how much a system can take. The real point is not about stability or anything technical, the point is having webpages up on the web that can be reached under all (well, excluding network problems, which includes DDoS attacks etc) circumstances. That this needs a server(s) (plus http server) to be up and running all the time is just part of the solution. I motivated my girlfriend to go to linux, she has her complaints about it often enough (esp. OOo, which is what she uses most; she was already using Netscape for mail etc, so with mozilla that was no real change); but last week I asked her: so you have problems with Office, ... one question: has linux ever crashed? She really had to think hard, but had to admit it hasn’t. Ever. Contrary to that other ‘solution’ that she was previously using. BTW She’s been using Mdk since 9.0 came out and I put it on her machine (sept 02). And since I told her I would not waste any time anymore on figuring out how to do/improve stuff on that other platform that she can also boot to. Serious arm twisting, I admit, but then I’m quite against illegal software, but also against paying for something riddled with bugs, and there you have the problem.... OOwriter has, though... So with the new mdk9.1 (new OOo) I hope things will be better for her, I’m sure the OOo team managed to squash quite a few bugs in the past 6 months. BTW I’ve had my fair share of crashes (also not related to overclocking and hardware), mostly because of playing with X; btw most crashes were a completely blocked X, which by the end user is usually perceived as a system crash (no possibility to switch with ctrl-alt-F[1-6] ) but I could on all counts actually remote logon with ssh, kill X and then some, and have the system restart. (NVidia drivers not so stable? X ? who knows..) So actually, apart from hardware instability, actually, I have never had a Mdk crash that I know of... Keeping my fingers crossed... :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ndeb Posted March 24, 2003 Report Share Posted March 24, 2003 All of these are server experiences which run no X and DE (Desktop Environment). I am running my own mdk-9.0 router/server: 10:49am up 31 days, 14:51, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT ndeb pts/1 192.168.1.3 10:49am 0.00s 0.08s 0.01s w What about desktop experiences ? How frequently do you have to restart ur DE/X ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shoegoo Posted March 24, 2003 Report Share Posted March 24, 2003 I just shut down my desktop Comqrap machine for the first time in 28 days. Its only been rebooted three times since the beginning of December. I restarted X about every 7 days. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MottS Posted March 25, 2003 Report Share Posted March 25, 2003 It remains really funny to see people talking about one distro being more stable than another one. It is like talking about the differences between a Plymouth Reliant and a Dodge Aries. They do not look exactly the same, they do not have the same options but they do have the same motor under the hood... so they are 'reliable' the same way (not reliable at all for that kind of car .. but that's another story ;) ). So what are the differences between RH, MDK or Gentoo running kernel 2.4.20? .. NOTHING other than the name. Oh there is tons of differences you will say. But those differences are options such as air conditionning or larger wheels... one distro provide more tools than the other one to tune the system up whereas the last one gives you pretty much nothing but the motor. But the motor stay the same for all three so I don't see why they would not last (in term of uptime) the same time under the same load on the same machine. Just funny.. MOttS Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnnyv Posted March 25, 2003 Report Share Posted March 25, 2003 All of these are server experiences which run no X and DE (Desktop Environment). I am running my own mdk-9.0 router/server: 10:49am up 31 days, 14:51, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00<!--QuoteEBegin--><!--QuoteEBegin-->USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT<!--QuoteEBegin--><!--QuoteEBegin-->ndeb pts/1 192.168.1.3 10:49am 0.00s 0.08s 0.01s w What about desktop experiences ? How frequently do you have to restart ur DE/X ? I had mdk 9.0 with kde running for over 70 days no probs, but that is a work station for my gaming station i expect far lower values due to the scary things games can do Generally if your not running Xfree and a window manager you can expect great uptimes. Only reason i have had work servers go down is either due to powercut/upgrade/hardware failure. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bradcarter Posted March 25, 2003 Report Share Posted March 25, 2003 There can be significant differences between the distros. Ussually each disto will add its own patches to the kernel (some like gentoo give you the option of the vanilla kernel) Some add patches and will use a different kernel config by default which can lead to stablity or proformance issues. Add this to a list of other things and those differences can add up Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MottS Posted March 25, 2003 Report Share Posted March 25, 2003 There can be significant differences between the distros. Ussually each disto will add its own patches to the kernel (some like gentoo give you the option of the vanilla kernel) Some add patches and will use a different kernel config by default which can lead to stablity or proformance issues. Add this to a list of other things and those differences can add up Yes they add patches to the vanilla kernel but all those patches are from the same source code. They don't reinvent the wheel my friend, they just modify the patch source code a bit so that it can be applied with other patches. In general they add pretty much the same patches. Ie Supermount, XFS, Preemptible, scheduling latency and so on. If you look at the patch list of each distro you'll see that there is not much difference. Regards, MOttS Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tcreek Posted May 24, 2003 Report Share Posted May 24, 2003 Mandrake is only stable as a server if boot it and don't touch it. As soon as you start fooling around with it it is surely to **** up./ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted May 26, 2003 Report Share Posted May 26, 2003 Strange to see everyone either for or against Mandrake in this respect. Its really just a case of what you do with it. Mandrake give you lots of optional extras so its bound to be less reliable than running a pure server with say NFS/Apache/Samba and no X. The difference in Mandrake and say Debian is unless you take the unstable Debian tree they don't give you anything to break it. Some examples: If I run Xine on my laptop which has a S3 twister graphics card with the default Xv it locks up completely, although I can telnet in and close it. StarOffice/OpenOffice did the same up to OO 1.1 unless i first set an ENVVAR! Then you have to consider if you are using a purevanilla system or did you add something (like css). As a server Mandrake is pretty reliable and the comment from Motts Yes they add patches to the vanilla kernel but all those patches are from the same source code. They don't reinvent the wheel my friend, they just modify the patch source code a bit so that it can be applied with other patches. " However when you start looking at the gaming/desktop stuff this is really no longer true. Take the xine example, this was causing a crash until I changed the video driver. This is actually in the .xine directory so theoretically a different user would still start xine with Xv. If I wanted to be certain I could remove the Xv driver but I havn't bothered. Certain releases are more or less stable than others and 9.1 is a bit of a pig with the 300MB of updates. These really should have made the box set, or at least most of them. RedHat 7.0 was just as bad or worse. It was the change in glibc and really stank. I used 7.1 beta as soon as it was available and that made a big difference. A beta version mpore stable than a boxed release. This really shows that lots of patches are different, I forget which vrsion of gcc was particularly bad but that itself caused lots of problems for distros that compiled using it. I'm actually pretty surprised about the uptimes quoted. I have always taken 'as long as I want it' to be as normal on a server. My servers have always run 24x7 once they become production and only get shut down for a new kernel or I move house or something. Finally, if you edit all your config files with vi - truly understand each line etc. you will have a stable server, 99.99% easily. If you use the DRAKCONF stuff I think not, especially in 9.1. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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