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BSD Operating Systems

Nearly 2 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD 112

Posted by michael from the running-the-numbers dept.
Echo|Fox writes "So much for *BSD is dying. The latest Netcraft survey shows over 2 million active sites, and almost 4 million active hostnames all running on FreeBSD. Combined with the report that 5 of the top 10 hosting companies in terms of reliability were FreeBSD based, it's been a very positive month *BSD wise. Perhaps the most interesting quote from the survey is: 'Indeed it [FreeBSD] is the only other operating system that is gaining, rather than losing share of the active sites found by the Web Server Survey.'"
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Nearly 2 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD More

Nearly 2 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD

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  • Ah hell, (Score:3, Funny)

    by Eneff ( 96967 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @02:39PM (#6444858)
    And I don't have the "BSD is Dying" troll handy.

    We still have the Natalie Portman and SCO dying trolls, right?
    __

    Seriously, I don't know why BSD isn't taken more seriously as a server. Linux is insecure, whereas BSD...

    Damn, another troll.

    I give up.
    • "SCO is dying" a troll? Hell, they're being a bit loud about it, but they are definately starting to go through the death [slashdot.org] throes [slashdot.org].

      In a year or two from now... I'd expect "BSD is dying" might be replaced with "SCO is dying"... and then it'll only be funny 'cause SCO will be long past dead by then (as Slashdot newbies say "SCO-who?")

  • Does Mac OS X count? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Isbiten ( 597220 ) <isbiten@ g m a i l . com> on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @02:40PM (#6444866) Homepage
    Does OS X count, when they sum up all the BSD machines?
  • Same Story Different Spin

    Maybe nobody was reading Slashdot on Sunday:
    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/ 13/132250 &mode=thread&tid=130&tid=185&tid=1 90
  • * IS DYING [hiro-tan.org] (including BSD and NETCRAFT)

  • Shocked (Score:1, Redundant)

    by Ashish Kulkarni ( 454988 )
    I'm shocked, I tell you. Truly shocked.

    All this time I was reading here that Netcraft confirmed that *BSD was dying...and now they say it's alive, has 2 million sites and is growing.

    Maybe they should make up their minds ... ;-)

  • Slight error in story posting (Score:5, Informative)

    by Sevn ( 12012 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @02:49PM (#6444974) Homepage Journal
    5 of the top 10 hosting companies in terms of reliability were FreeBSD based

    When in actuality the netcraft article says this:

    "Intriguingly, all of the Top 5 placed sites run the FreeBSD operating system" :)

    Slight difference there.
    • When in actuality the netcraft article says this: "Intriguingly, all of the Top 5 placed sites run the FreeBSD operating system" :)

      Indeed! One might wonder if a troll submitted this story pre-emptively, with a bad summary, as part of a damage control effort.

      I like penguins. I just don't want them screwing up my machines. :p

  • Might as well get this out of the way now... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Sevn ( 12012 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @02:55PM (#6445042) Homepage Journal
    This doesn't show anything! I'm a big fanboy for:

    _____ -- put OS here

    That runs:

    _____ -- put web server here

    And it's just as reliable and good as FreeBSD.
    Hell, It's BETTER because:

    ___________________________-- put dubious statistics here

    _______ -- put marketing rhetoric here

    And besides, you can't do:

    ________ -- put proprietary technology here

    with FreeBSD anyway so it's worthless!!!

  • News at 11... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @03:00PM (#6445120)

    ...nearly 2 million active sites are dying :)

  • I wonder how much the FUD from SCO might have contributed to this ...
    • virtually none I imagine. huge hosting centres don't decide to change their hosting OS as a lightly made decision and it's not something they can or would do quickly. if they're using it now, then they were using it last year in all likelyhood.

      not that linux is a bad OS by any means, but perhaps all these sites are using freebsd, cos they like it and thinks it performs well, rather than just using it as a refuge from legal action?

      dave

  • miscellania (sp?) (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ph43thon ( 619990 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @04:27PM (#6446148) Journal
    I found this article hopeful.. at first. It seems to suggest that the only reason BSD sites are increasing is because of mainly Yahoo and a few other hosting sites who use BSD. Either way, if Yahoo uses it.. people who work at Yahoo must learn to administer it. So that's good.. I guess.

    Now, as for the professional "anon cows" who seem to dedicate their creativity to explaining the end of BSD, these arguments are disingenious. Mainly, the only thing that may or may not be dying is the current power structure behind the three named distributions (open, free, net). The centralized structure may eventually die.. and then BSD will just adopt the decentralized model ala Linux.

    saying FreeBSD is dying would be like saying "Latin is dying" back when it started branching into its current variants. By making such statements.. one just shows how little they grasp what BSD is. Maybe people don't speak Latin today... but they certainly speak Spanish or Italian. In the future, people may not have a Main Office to hold their "I heart BSD" rallies.. but they will be using it.

  • FreeBSD is very alive!!! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by horcy ( 545339 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @04:29PM (#6446165) Homepage
    I'm running FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE as a server/router solution. I've talked with linux users about al the amazing features it has and the stability it offers. All of have switched to FreeBSD. If you want to install something, you just look up your port in the ports list, you type: make install distclean, and you are ready. It automatically downloads it from a ftp server, if the first is down, it checks for a mirror site. It checks for all necessary dependencies and installs that too. I started with Mandrake linux and after that i'm in FreeBSD land. Never looked back since. Oh did i mention it has the Unreal Tournament and Quake3 server in the ports? One "make install" away for pure gaming haven for you and all your friends =P
    • For a server / gateway / router, I'd agree. FreeBSD is really good. I have my home gateway / router setup as a FreeBSD system. I think configuring it is actually easier than Linux configuring. Almost everything is done in the /etc/rc.conf file on FreeBSD, except my firewall script.

      I use NetBSD on my laptop though cause it has better hardware support than FreeBSD for some reason? FreeBSD used to hang on my laptop nic and sound didn't work, so I use NetBSD there.

      However for applications / my desktop I

      • It is very unfair, in my opinion, to refer to the process of system call translation (the driving force behind FreeBSD's linuxulator, which enables, for those of you who don't know, software *compiled for Linux* to run on FreeBSD- of note only for the Linux software that does not have source available) as emulation. It is binary compatibility of the highest order. Simply put, it does little more than translate syscall numbers on the fly, also adjusting for things like differences in arguments. Quickly si
    • urpmi [zarb.org] nameofpackage

      ...or in debian...

      apt-get install nameofpackage

      ...or in MS-Windows...

      Aaaah! Where do I click? How do I pay for this? I want my paperclip!

      • apt-get install nameofpackage
        Does that allow to customise the package with make options?
        • Yes. Debian's installs often provide run-time configuration based on a few simple questions as well (with reasonable defaults).

          URPMI also installs from source, more opaque than Debian installs but often with more useful collections of patches and/or options preloaded, and you can always do the rebuild process by hand to suggest things to configure.

          More typing, of course, but TANSTAAFL.

          I suppose you could always try Debian FreeBSD and see how you get along.

  • What the summary doesn't tell you (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ArmorFiend ( 151674 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @06:44PM (#6447642) Homepage Journal
    Indeed it [FreeBSD] is the only
    other operating system that is gaining, rather than losing share

    Only other than what? It turns out, if you follow links, that Win2k3 server is the other gaining OS. They go on to say this:

    Comparing the sites which are now hosted on Windows 2003 with their operating system in December 2002 shows over 42% of these to be new sites, 43% (68K) to be upgrades from other Windows platforms (mainly Windows 2000), 5% (8K) to be migrations from Linux and 1% from other operating systems.


    Microsoft will take some considerable encouragement at the number of sites that have switched from Linux.


    Woo, 1/20th of their new sales come from previously linux sites.
    *Makes hand-wank gesture*
    • It just means that the number of windows software pirates has increased in proportion to the number of useless lame web sites. I have no dought Win2003 is the spammers Os of choice. If one looks to the Orient software pirates prefer Windows server software because of ease of use, and the fact that it is easy to pirate. I believe I have read somewhere that the pirate trick is now by using a false verification web activation, and the law authorities are having real trouble keeping track of the pirates.

      Gates

    • Whats really important here is did the total Windows server increase or decrease. I would expect 2003 to increase because it is so new and well known. Well, NT 4 server to decrease until it is no more, and 2000? not sure.

    • look at netcrafts page today :)

      netcraft [netcraft.com]

      Windows Server 2003 approaching 100,000 active sites; 8,000 sites switch from Linux
    • What is your point. Are you comapring versions of OS's or OS's? Win2k3 is the same as Win2K and WinNT.

      • What is your point.

        Is this a question? If it is a question, then my point is: Its so bleedingly obvious (to THEM) that Dohs2k3 is gaining market share that they don't even have to say that it is! I'm suprised that its that much of a foregone conclusion.

        Are you comapring versions of OS's or OS's? Win2k3 is the same as Win2K and WinNT.

        True enough, they're doing apples-to-oranges.
  • It's easy to disassociate the nameserver from the OS using the ports tree so it's easy to upgrade the system and more secure since you can run in a change-root.

    See this USENET post [google.com].

  • Enterprise BSD? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @10:05PM (#6449155)
    I'm involved in an Oracle on Solaris/sparc to Linux/Intel migration, and I can't but thinking why not also FreeBSD for the enterprise? It has the fibre HBA drivers for SAN, it has a volume manager, it has a very stable filesystem (moreso than ext2/3), it can run Oracle with Linux emulation libraries, has SMP, a fantastic TCP/IP stack, easy installation/upgrading of ports & packages.

    I never used FreeBSD until a few months ago when I tried to get my favorite, OpenBSD, up on a very weird 1U Intel based server I picked up on eBay from a failed telco. Versions 2.9 to 3.3 of OBSD wouldn't work, it would hang in the idle loop FreeBSD 5.x has been running fine on it (don't know why)
    • You seem to miss the beauty of the ports collection.

      Using the ports I can adapt my server to be my desktop computer, and vice versa with my desktop PC.

      If you look into other "enterprise" OSS solutions, you'll find out they are not HUGELY different from the normal solutions. For instance redhat enterprise software is mostly different from the normal redhat OS because it has a longer shelf-life, meaning you do not need to upgrade every 6 months.

    • Re:Enterprise BSD? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by MattBurke ( 58682 )
      Try taking a sniff around the servers of larger, more clueful ISPs - They almost all use FreeBSD. Why? Because that's the place FreeBSD grew up. Linux has the hobyist hackers working on it whereas a high proportion of FreeBSD users/developers work in the ISP biz. It's just evolved into the perfect serious server OS.

      I've seen FreeBSD boxes (mail servers to be precise) with load averages approaching 1000. They were sluggish, but perfectly usable both over ssh and smtp. That was during a rather nasty spam at

  • OS/2 IS DYING! (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What more proof do you need?!
  • I've found FreeBsd to be a nice stable platform which I run my business on. No dowtime due to kernels oops. It just gets up and runs and runs and runs...

    Yeah ok this is a pimp but FreeBSD just works and the package management is only second to debian (which I think is being ported)

    Rus
    • package management only second to debian?! I'm sorry, but the fBSD package management system is by far better than debian. (this may seem like a troll... but it's not, I swear) Debian packages tend to be outdated. And, while this doesn't really matter on a server (unless you're upgrading to fix an exploit, I guess), it means that I can't stand using it on a desktop (yes... I use freeBSD as a desktop at home). On freebsd, if I want to upgrade my ports tree, no problem. cvsup it and I've got updated packages.
  • Netcraft is dying!

  • Elegy for *BSD (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Elegy For *BSD

    I am a *BSD user
    and I try hard to be brave
    That is a tall order,
    *BSD's foot is in the grave.

    I tap at my toy keyboard
    and whistle a happy tune
    but keeping happy's so hard,
    *BSD died so soon.

    Each day I wake and softly sob
    Nightfall finds me crying
    Not only am I a zit faced slob
    but *BSD is dying.

  • OK, I already know I'm stupid, so please don't feel compelled to point that out, BUT... Aren't these statistics based on IP addresses? If so, does anyone know how many actual boxes comprise the 2 mil sites?

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