Posted by Seventh Stage I have used many Windows machines in the past and many Linux ones, it was always my impression that Linux worked better and the tests that I did proved that. What tests have you done?

Sorry for taking so long to respond. Been rather busy at work, but came up with a good example of Linux VS Windows.

The example here is software raid.

We wanted to build a "warm backup" file server in case the main file server failed. The main server has a nice hardware raid and all that, but the backup was just made of what we could get our hands on. Since another raid card and nice drives was not in the budget, software raid it was. I scrounged up a fairly decent PC (A64 3400), a bunch of PATA drives and an extra IDE controller so each drive would be on it's own channel. The MB also had 4 SATA channels, but we were only using one for the OS drive. Normally we would have gone with Windows 2003 (which we eventually did), but it's software raid 5 is rather slow and I heard good things about md in Linux so it was a good opportunity to test it out. I also considered ZFS with Solaris or FreeBSD. I have a ZFS experience and like using it, but the NIC on the MB I had didn't have drivers for either Solaris or FreeBSD, just Windows and Linux.

So, on with the comparison.

Setup the raid:
No question, Windows wins here. Not that mdadm is hard once you figure it out, but it's not anywhere close to the ease of use of the Disk Management in Windows. It's also not as nice as zfs in that you had to setup partitions separately.

Speed:
Linux wins hands down. It was way faster, almost an order of magnitude faster than Windows when writing to the raid 5 array. I was very impressed.

So, based on that I was pretty happy with Linux and was willing to deal with the less than ideal ease of use. However, it came time to put the real data on the drive. Instead of syncing the over 500 GB of data over the network, we decided to simply connect a SATA drive that had a fairly recent copy of our data to one of the unused ports on the MB temporarily and then copy it to the raid 5 array.

Robustness:
Windows handles this no problem, the new drive shows up and you can do as you please.
Linux took a shit all over itself when the extra drive was connected. The extra drive shifted all the device names around so the raid broke. Since the raid was broken it wouldn't boot up, even though nothing in the boot up depended on it. It wouldn't even boot up in it's so called "safe mode". I was able to fix things by booting up in single user and telling it where to look for the raid drives now. So much for "working better".

At that point I said fuck it and went back to Windows. If something so simple can break it I'll put up with the slow speeds. Reliability and robustness is much more important than speed.

Afterwards I tested with a few other distros and PCs to see if it was just the one I was using. The problem occurred in every distro I tried (Ubuntu server, Fedora, Debian and Cent OS). Even when using SCSI drives, adding another usually screwed things. Unless the added drive was considered to be "after" the array drives by Linux it fucked the array until it was fixed in single user mode.

Also, Windows isn't the only one to handle this correctly. FreeBSD correctly skips unused device nodes so they don't shift around when the a drive is added or removed. This is just caused by Linux being stupid.

what were you using to maintain/build the raid?


edit: this HFS thing looks pretty cool, and ive heard that XAMPP is a great solution for a portable web server as well (you can install it to a USB key)! hope i didnt sound like i was trying to beat anyone over the head with linux. this was not my intention. its really the only http server platform i have any experience with -- so its the only one i could suggest and find some good setup examples for!

Posted by neX_ what were you using to maintain/build the raid?

I'm not exactly sure what you are asking. On the linux distros I used fdisk to create the raid partitions then mdadm to build the raid. I configured mdadm.conf to start the raid automaticaly at boot. Then I used mk2fs to create the filesystem on the raid. On windows I used Disk Managment, but I have also used diskpart. On Solaris/FreeBSD I used ZFS to create a RAID-Z.

Posted by neX_ edit: this HFS thing looks pretty cool, and ive heard that XAMPP is a great solution for a portable web server as well (you can install it to a USB key)! hope i didnt sound like i was trying to beat anyone over the head with linux. this was not my intention. its really the only http server platform i have any experience with -- so its the only one i could suggest and find some good setup examples for!

I'm not trying to bash Linux. Quite the opposite, Linux makes a great web server and would be an excellent choice in this situation with the right distro. With Windows you need 2003 or higher to have a good version of IIS or you need to run Apache which runs better on Linux anyway. IIS/PWS in XP and below sucks. My point was that Linux is not better than Windows at everything. In many cases Windows is the better choice for the task at hand. The reverse is also true.

In this situation the user has a low end PC so most "easy" GUI based Linix distros are worse choices than 2000 or XP. Ubuntu requires three times the RAM of XP and six times the RAM of 2000. If "easy" isn't required then a no-GUI Linix distro or FreeBSD are better choices than Windows.

i just didnt want to see one of those stupid 'holy wars' start! ive been on a couple of mailing lists where they have, and they just get incredibly stupid.

mdadm is a fairly good tool, but its nothing compared to the tools that ship with freebsd. software raid, in genera, is addled. ive seen firsthand what it can do to overall system load on a machine, and i choose to no longer use it. hardware all the way!

ubuntu server doesnt have the same hardware requirements that the desktop version does afaik.

systemx29: what direction did you end up going in?

Posted by Washu Sorry for taking so long to respond. ...

You are absolutely right about the ease of use with Windows, I am not surprised that you had a much easier time setting up the raid. Frankly that is one of the reasons Microsoft has such a strong hold on the OS market and I have always seen it as a trade off.

The extra drive shifted all the device names around so the raid broke. Since the raid was broken it wouldn't boot up, even though nothing in the boot up depended on it.

Interesting problem, I had to add a new drive to a server at my work and it occurred to me that this could happen and mess up all the init scripts. Luckily it was not the case. I have not done any device file hacking with Linux so I do not know what the proper steps should have been. If someone came to me with that problem I would probably have given the typical admin answer: "You shouldn't have done that.". I definitely would have expected that problem to occur on other distros.

I am surprised, though, that it would not boot up. Was the boot loader trying to pass control to the wrong drive? If that was the case, no mode you had available should work.

What it really comes down to for me is that Linux gives you the ability to hack around a problem to whatever level of detail you are willing to learn. I have not had as good a time with that on Windows. Even when you take the time to learn the terminal commands they do not always work consistently. For example, I had a project where I had to set a great deal of permissions on files for a number of NT builds. I automated this using the cacls command, but for different instances of the same build the security audits would find ones not set correctly and usually not consistently different.

Posted by neX_ ubuntu server doesnt have the same hardware requirements that the desktop version does afaik.

This is true, Ubuntu server's requirements are much lower than the desktop version. However, they are still higher than 2000's and it defiantly does not count as "easy".

Posted by Seventh Stage I am surprised, though, that it would not boot up. Was the boot loader trying to pass control to the wrong drive? If that was the case, no mode you had available should work.

By "not boot up" I meant it would not complete it's boot to a prompt. The kernel loaded, but the init scripts would hang when trying to bring up the raid.

Posted by <Various> <dickwaving>

This guy wants to host a few of his own photos off his box.

I've seen recommendations for him to start with a new OS that he doesn't know, unlike anything he's ever used - one without even such rudimentary tools as a personal application-layer firewall which a novice would need; for him to switch to 200+$ enterprise software packages; for him to switch to a duct-taped stack of long-evolved old, complex, non-intuitive enterprise-grade software with daunting text-based configuration; even for him to access this chaotic supercritical mass of ridiculosity through a command-line interface.

Hell, even head-hangingly silly side-attacks such as a chewbacca defense of aforementioned dickwaving such as bringing process schuduling - I'm sure a novice home user who wants to host to a few people at once on a DSL line is going to have a strong opinion on which process scheduler he wishes to use. I'm pretty sure he also needs a full development toolchain so that he can roll his own kernel to optimize it, run ZFS for the filesystem and Dtrace to find any possible IO bottlenecks, oh, a load-balancing application firewall such as a Sideinder, and then you can't forget the hardware IDS because if the system was rooted (you might not notice otherwise), wait - why isn't he using a serial console to administer the machine, WHERE IS THE UPS, etc...

... LOL

XD

The word "RAID" showing up here is already autofail - it is trivial for what he wants to even burn a single DVD for 1$ and 10mins time, with all data to back up it (and, if he's using Windows, all data including the system itself will easily fit on a single DVD guaranteed to last 18+ years). It came up 23 times. A. novice. wants. to. host. pictures. off. an. ancient. box. Why can't this thread just die? XD

Needing to go on about how awesome you are by talking about unrelated unhelping offtopic crap *does* show quite a lot, but nothing you'd normally want to say. It shows quite explicitly, for example, to everyone who isn't a tech zealot, exactly why so many CIOs are often Business majors who have little, if anything, to do with Computer Science/Computer Engineering. It hints quite strongly at a deep-seated characteristic of obsession, lack of professional boundries, and that groundless fanaticism in an ideal can easily influence a decision in computer software.

If someone asks for help and you give him help, even if it's very impolite and a nasty "JUST FUCKING GOOGLE IT" along with a link that shows him what he should have googled, then you're at least helping (I do this quite often. The "acrimonious" under my avatar is a warning to take things with a grain of salt, not just a cool word). If someone asks for computer help and, instead of helping, you try to convert him without strong obvious reasons, his computer problem remains, but another unrelated problem is found. You see the unfortunate extreme end of this exact line of action in South America and Central Africa, where several church-sponsered charity groups actually force the people in need to convert to their religion before even giving them food.

edit: this HFS thing looks pretty cool, and ive heard that XAMPP is a great solution for a portable web server as well (you can install it to a USB key)! hope i didnt sound like i was trying to beat anyone over the head with linux. this was not my intention. its really the only http server platform i have any experience with -- so its the only one i could suggest and find some good setup examples for!

All normal modern OSes are great and often perfect for something. In this case, even discussing them is offtopic since the OP clearly asks for a Windows solution and not "buy a mac", "Get SkyOS because it's been built to be better at this exact purpose", "shove a Gumstix SBC up your dog's ass and wire a wifi antenna in his tail - call it Roaming Rover's Rough Resolution", "BUT ITS AN OOOLD SYSTEM SO USE A SPECIALTY x86 EMBEDDED OS LIKE QNX", or anything else that others (not you, neX) concocted. I find it absolutely disrespectful to the edge of disgraceful that otherwise clear-headed, very intelligent, interesting, and helpful people simply see the thread and barge in and shit all over his request with shit the person who actually needs help doesn't need, doesn't want, couldn't use, might need to pay large amount of cash for, wouldn't understand, couldn't secure, couldn't trust, couldn't repait, and didn't ask for, just because it's their "religion" and they feel an innate illogical need to promote it only to derail it completely and utterly to argue/discuss sematics about arguments that didn't belong in the original discussion in the first place - whether just to show off, to try to "win" the Internet Argument*, to continue to try to force their un-asked-for dogma, whatever. Not only that, but even doing this when there are loads of products that do everything that was asked for, and more, that are small, simple, fast, efficient, run on what he has experience with, and are free. It's a bit like when the pope, an incredibly rich man, visits a disaster area to make an appearance and "pray" for the survivors victims, when he could often easily simply pay for the damage to the people begging for help, without even affecting the church's *netto* income for that year. <.<

* -

Posted by Beryl

I agree with you Beryl for the most part. This thread really has devolved into a major off topic "dickwaving" fest. And I fully admit I've been part of that.

However, you are part of it too. You are doing exactly what most others are doing on this thread: Proposing the solution you think will help the user best and downplaying everything else.

Maybe you are correct, the solution you proposed with HFS is a very good one and may very well be the best one in this thread. Then again maybe not. It doesn't take much to find some downsides, some of them major, with the solution you proposed. Downsides that some other solutions don't have. Nothing is perfect, everything posted here has it's pluses and minuses. I'm not going to continue the dickwaving by picking apart every little flaw in your HFS proposal, but it does have flaws, just like everything else.

Posted by Beryl anger, anger, and more anger...

Discussing operating systems and their features is not too far from the original request. Not knowing how far systemx29 is interested in going, nor any other reader of this thread, makes people inclined to post many options. Other than yours, none of the posts have been bashing other peoples suggestions. We have, however, challenged each others assumptions with data and examples.

Posted by Washu Proposing the solution you think will help the user best and downplaying everything else.

That would've been wonderful; as it was, everyone else's suggestions only offered the solution(s) *they* liked most and ignored the OP's wishes and the non-technical world outside of them entirely. Yours ("If you don't like linux, 2k is fine") wasn't nearly as bad as others, and while it's great advice - and better than what he asked for - it still blatantly ignored the fact that he specifically stated he wanted to use Win98. ;)


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Theory:
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- "What if he didn't know of the other options available?"
Presuming that he's an idiot is fairly insulting and disrepctful; If he asked specifically for Win98, he probably wants Win98. So the only polite thing to do would be to give something that works on 98 or give nothing.

- "I know for a fact that JamesOS is so much better, that Win98 will kill his wife, and that if he switches today, he'll get 100$ for free"
See above. JamesOS was excluded in the OP, mentioning it WITHOUT giving a second apt suggestion makes you a weenie. If you make a real suggestion AND include JamesOS as a second option, who cares, you actually helped him with what he wanted. (Like Washu did).
Help = Cool.
Help, Give more than what was wanted = Cool.
Don't help and go on about stuff that doesn't solve the problem = lol.

- "I only wanted to give another option of something I know is better!"
Such as in the case of someone telling someone uneducated and sensitive that chickenpox parties are a good idea <whereas whomever does such a thing can easily lose their kids, one way or another, for mindlessly placing them in mortal danger> or that cancer can be healed simply with vitamins - they are doing more harm than if they hadn't said anything by causing disinformation and confusion, and therefore causing, often unnoticed, a direct attack against the Other where the normal protection of "good intentions" does not apply as the intention is only personal satisfaction <such as getting someone to use linux because: You like it, you think it's cool, you want to spread the ideals of OSS, you think it's better, etc... when something non-linux is asked for> - hence the "religion" comparison. ;)

- "Other than yours, none of the posts have been bashing other peoples suggestions."
Well, that's not very helpful, either. If no one posts to point out the BAD parts of a suggestion (how it isn't applicable, how it fails, how other things work better, bas experiences working with it, etc...), than you can't be properly informed of how it might or might not work for what you want. Purely logically "bashing" other suggestions is not only the entire point of Peer Review, but is one of the quickest, cleanest, and most logical ways to show weaknesses (and, thereby, through differentials, the strengths and *appropriateness*) of the suggestion. To disagree with this pathologically is to be against even remote applications of this technique such as the method of how the Better Business Beaureau works, who work to show the big picture of a company's credibility, loyalty, and trustworthyness by documenting bad experience (and only bad experiences).

Posted by Beryl That would've been wonderful; as it was, everyone else's suggestions only offered the solution(s) *they* liked most and ignored the OP's wishes and the non-technical world outside of them entirely. Yours ("If you don't like linux, 2k is fine") wasn't nearly as bad as others, and while it's great advice - and better than what he asked for - it still blatantly ignored the fact that he specifically stated he wanted to use Win98. ;)

I don't think it is unreasonable to politely point out to the OP that what they asked for is somewhat foolish when much better and equally "easy" options are available. While it would work, Windows 98 is a horrible option for a web server. Pointing out that Win2k will run fine on 99% of the hardware that runs 98 and be a much better option is sound advice. Would you have given him advice on how to run a web server on 3.1? DOS? A Palm Pilot? Sometimes you have to say "what you have won't work in a reasonable way, this is the minimum you need to get... ". For a web server an NT based windows is a reasonable cutoff.

Also, if you read all my posts I did tell him that Apache runs on 98, so I didn't ignore the fact that he wanted 98. I hadn't heard of HFS before, so at the time I posted that it was a reasonable option.

Posted by Washu Also, if you read all my posts I did tell him that Apache runs on 98, so I didn't ignore the fact that he wanted 98. I hadn't heard of HFS before, so at the time I posted that it was a reasonable option.

If you make a real suggestion AND include JamesOS as a second option, who cares, you actually helped him with what he wanted. (Like Washu did).