[Techtalk] Beyond personal -> large scale Linux usage

[Sophie]

On Sun, Aug/11/02 03:34:13PM -0400, Scott wrote:
> 
> I am taking over an ISP that services several hundred clients and I am
> moving from BSDI and FreeBSD to Linux and have been spending the last
> month playing with the different distro's to see what they can handle.

I know people who swear by FreeBSD to run their ISPs, and I know people who swear by Linux to run their ISPs :)

May I ask why you're switching from BSD to Linux? I assume you're also familiar with BSD, and have investigated it's merits.

For the people runnign Linux, from what I know, it seems the customers' hosted servers run RedHat or SuSE (presumablly because the customers need "familiarity", whatever that is), and the ISP-administered machines run Debian. They seem to have no problems with load whatsoever, on machines from low-end pentiums to alphas, with a similar number of customers.

It would seem a good thing to distribute services across many seperate machines - single purpose servers - to allow you to spread the load (using Linux or BSD gives you an advantage in cheap hardware choices for this...) and also to identify which services use the most resources, and then to give just those specific machines more attention.

I'd also like to pimp Gentoo Linux, (www.gentoo.org), because I helped develop a little of it :) It's kind of a BSDish Linux, and imho worth investigating, as it takes a lot of the effort out things like updatign packages. Sort of :) It's also been called "the fastest distro" by many people. On the other hand, I personally serve things from OpenBSD wherever possible, but that's just me :)

- sophie