Update: Wikipedia moves its servers from RHELold Red Hat Linux/Fedora to Ubuntu
I found it interesting to read this Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols post about Wikipedia moving its servers from a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux old versions of pre-RHEL Red Hat Linux and Fedora Linux to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.
It's hard to see exactly why they didn't opt for the free CentOS version of RHEL, so it's not just about the distro being free and having long-term support.
Some say it's the easier upgrade path for Debian-based distros like Ubuntu, the difference in package management between apt-based Debian-like systems and RPM/Yum-based Red Hat-like systems.
Whatever the reason, it's a big win for Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical. I've never really thought of Ubuntu as a server OS because they seem to be all about the desktop experience, and I figure that Debian is a way more popular choice on the server.
But there must be something (or a combination of somethings) from an operational standpoint, whether it be installation and maintenance, long-term support, hardware compatibility, remote/automated management options, reliability or performance that is driving a company/entity like Wikipedia to adopt Ubuntu on the server.
Note: I found out through Matt Asay's post on this subject, where the comments include a response from Brion Vibber, CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation, where he sort of clarifies the fact that Wikipedia/Wikimedia never used the paid-for, supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux but instead was using old versions of pre-RHEL Red Hat Linux. (Actually, the commenter before Vibber says that Wikimedia used RHL instead of RHEL, and Vibber only says that his company was "never, at any time, a customer of Red Hat."
In a word: yikes. That's old code. But it's good to see that it still works.
And for clarity's sake, here's The Register's article on the subject, which makes somewhat clear the use of RHL, and why Wikimedia is choosing Ubuntu's LTS distribution:
Wikimedia has 350 servers today supporting its operations and fewer than 20 desktops, with the exception of a couple of servers still running a Red Hat Linux and a Windows desktop machine that is used to run QuickBooks to do the accounting for the foundation.All remaining servers and many desktops are running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. All future servers will be setup with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, and Wikimedia intends to push that LTS-only idea to the limit by not changing Linuxes unless it has to.
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New ways to sign in to comment: I just added the ability for prospective commenters on this blog to sign in using their AOL, Yahoo! and Wordpress.com accounts (for the past 200 posts anyway ... more than that will take an extensive, middle-of-the-night rebuild). That's in addition to the other sign-in choices, which include starting a Movable Type account on this blog, Typekey, OpenID, Live Journal and Vox. If you have trouble getting your Movable Type account verified, or any of the other sign-in options are not working properly, please e-mail me. With these added ways of signing in, there's more reason than ever for you to make a comment (or several!).
Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
This is a test. I started having a lot of trouble with typekey last night and tried to login several places w/o success.
Apparently I am operational now.
At the moment I am using W2K, old but fine. Sometimes I use Linux Ubuntu, it depends on whether I want to work quickly on a system I know, or more slowly on a system I am learning.
Sorry to bother you.
I find Typekey to be very reliable. It just wasn't all that successful in terms of users. Honestly, I'd rather rely on Typekey, in which Six Apart manages the users, than the Movable Type comments, which are managed locally at each installation, but the MT comment accounts do "fit" the system better and are better understood by users than any of these other systems.
In other words, if Typekey — or OpenID or Vox, for that matter — really had some "traction" in other blogs and systems, they'd be more useful on our blogs here at the Daily News.
That's one of the reasons Blogger is so successful with sign-in comments. Besides having better spam filters in the first place (and actual working CAPTCHAs without needing plugins), so many people have Google accounts that you have an instant user base. That's something Typekey never had (and never will).
Aside from chicken/egg popularity issues, I do like Typekey, though.
Ken, I still have a box running Windows 2000, but only because I have barely powered it up in the past year and a half. It started its life with me on Windows 98se, and in a failed attempt to get an Airlink 101 PCI wireless card to work, I upgraded to Win 2K. That card did work for awhile, but the software broke pretty quickly.
The card had drivers for Win 98se, Win 2K and XP, but it never worked well and eventually stopped working altogether. So much for wireless being easy to configure in Windows.
Once I did the upgrade from 98se to 2000, it took me quite awhile to reconfigure the box so Microsoft Update would work. I then put Avast antivirus software on it.
It's a white-box PC with 333 MHz Pentium II MMX and a maxed-out 256 MB of RAM. 10 GB hard drive and old-school sound card not on the PCI bus but in those "legacy" slots (ISA??? I can't remember what they're called).
The box is still pretty much a dog, but I've spent so much time running my Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop with a 233 MHz Pentium II and only 144 MB RAM that it might be considered speedy in comparison if I installed Debian, Slackware or even OpenBSD on it.
I've run Puppy on it, but I never got around to running a full Linux or BSD on it. I have a newer Dell (Pentium 4 1.2 GHz, or something similar) that I'm bringing on as my next test machine, especially if I can find some more memory for it. It has 256 MB installed, but the modules are PC800 RIMMS, which is error-correcting server memory and not as easy to find as the PC133 SIMMS that I'm used to installing in my old desktops.