Thor, after I joined SI I discovered that one can meet people of
good and decent character as judged by what I hold as values.
The just mentioned I found to be worth more than the initial quest
to make money from these investments, and thru the wonderful
posts of Jack Smith on this thread I believe most of us here have
captured the important link between a person's investment into a
company, and that company treating with respect our investment.
This connection allows me to present an idea of action that seems
to replace a person to person relationship with that of cold money.
For I now say one objective should be of focus, and that is to have
this GPGI company deliver of its promise and return to investors
an increase in share value, hopefully big time.
Because of this I am willing to "... climb any mountain, swim an
ocean, cross any valley, and even eat a little chit" if it will allow
this company to become successful for us shareholders.
If the sag has a flow of communication with GPGI, and the information
that sag has can be trusted, then it is up to us to identify a threader
on this thread whom we can trust, and have this threader contact
the sag and report back to this thread not details, but a yes or no,
as in Wait & Trust.
(off topic - In a nut shell, the onion peeling Linux is doing.) Easy to read article Linux OS.
Note: I have none=zero business or monetary connections with Ziff-Davis Inc., and it for
me simply represents a web site to obtain news and software for FREE, after you do a
simple join that requires the same as other types web sites needing your e-mail address.
The following is where the home page is. zdnet.com
My only direct contact is a request for permission to post a specific article, or two.
Note: Do not copy or reference this SI Doug A K post, per see below.
Copyright (c) 1999 ZDNet.
All rights reserved.
Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium
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zdnet.com
SPECIAL REPORT MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 1999
Is Linux a Legitimate Network OS?
Michael J. Miller, Editor-In-Chief
PC Magazine
Does Linux bring both savings and increased reliability to your server
room as it takes over a range of tasks from a more costly OS, such as
Windows NT, NetWare and popular Unix variants? Does it actually deliver
enough to make it worth the retraining investment? PC Magazine Labs set
up a host of services from scratch using Linux and its associated
utilities to find out.
The conclusion: Linux is a good solution for a range of server needs. It
should certainly be on the radar screens of most medium- and
large-business IS professionals. Linux works especially well as a
platform for Internet-standard services, such as DNS, HTTP, FTP and
email, where its low cost, open-source utilities and relative ease of
deployment are big draws. It also works well as a development platform
for those who want to deploy a customized vertical application. You
might want to think twice, however, with applications that demand the
best performance or the best reliability; Linux offers no clustering
support and has immature SMP support and limited file-system support and
RAID functionality.
Also note that for the near term at least, Linux is mostly restricted to
server applications. Software developers, engineers and designers have
found it a good foundation for workstations as well, but true
desktop-productivity applications are scarce. (One exception is Corel
WordPerfect 8 for Linux; the complete WordPerfect Office suite for Linux
is due in early 2000.)
The big difference between Linux and a proprietary network operating
system is that Linux is open-source, so it can be seen, used, modified,
or augmented by anyone. You can download the code in pieces free from
the Internet or buy a package of the operating system, tools, shells and
utilities (in Linux lingo, a distribution) for about $50 to $80 from
industry leaders such as Red Hat, Caldera and SuSE.
You pay no licensing fee -- even if you use Linux to serve a thousand
users. Compare that with a Windows NT Server license -- $1,999 for 5
clients, $3,999 for 25 clients -- and you'll see it's little wonder an
entire community has sprung up to support Linux. The IS departments of
major corporations are beginning to test, use, and embrace it as a
complement (or even alternative) to NetWare, Windows NT, or one of the
Unix variants.
Even if your IS team is new to Linux and Unix, Linux is still worth
considering. The amount of free support for Linux is staggering: Nearly
every part of Linux and its add-ons -- shells, editors, interfaces --
has a Web site devoted to it. Moreover, the manufacturers of the PCs
examined here have adopted wide-ranging support strategies. To learn
much more about PC Labs? findings, be sure to read our full evaluation.
BUILDING A BIGGER LINUX CLUSTER
New work from the Linux Cluster Cabal (LCC) could move the alternative
OS to a data center near you. The LCC looks to bring clustering
capabilities to Linux. Clustering allows users to link multiple servers
together to make a single high-performance server. The group believes it
can build a Linux cluster that would support up to 1,024 systems, more
cheaply than existing Unix clusters.
Linux heads for the data center
The Linux Cluster Cabal has a plan that could see Linux handling the
heaviest of heavy-duty applications.
By Andrew Orlowski, ZDNet (UK)
September 24, 1999 2:27 PM PT
Linux could be on its way to the data center if an ambitious new project
comes to fruition.
The project, being worked on by the Linux Cluster Cabal, aims to bring
clustering to Linux. Clustering technology lets users harness multiple
servers together to make one high-performance server. Originally created
by Digital Equipment Corp. (NYSE:DEC) to give minicomputers the power of
mainframes, it has extended into other arenas, including Unix.
The LCC is drafting a clustering architecture aimed at breaking the
performance ceiling of today's commercial Unix-based clusters. The group
aims to build a Linux cluster that could support up to 1,024 systems, or
nodes, and do it much more cheaply than current high-end Unix clusters.
While there are other Linux clustering efforts underway, the LCC project
will seek to match Digital's VMS-style clustering -- now marketed as
Compaq TruClusters -- on a grand scale.
Movers and shakers
"There's no point working for clustering that stops at 100 nodes," said
Cabal member Larry McVoy, who led Sun Microsystems Inc.'s first
clustering initiative and is now president of BitMover Inc. "In eighteen
months to two years, the dozen or so clustering initiatives on Linux
will be dead," he predicted.
In addition to McVoy, the Cabal includes Linux heavy hitters Stephen
Tweedie, who heads Linux file system development, and Peter Braam of
Stelia Computing and leader of the group that built Carnegie Mellon
University's Coda distributed file system.
They first met in secret in August to devise a clustering architecture
that satisfies both commercial data processing and HPC (high-performance
computing) requirements.
Although Linux has proved successful with the latter -- the Beowulf
technical supercomputing project scales to several hundred nodes -- it
has lacked the high availability features sought by corporate IT
departments.
The Cabal takes advantage of the lack of kernel locks in Linux -- a
virtue of its relative youth -- as the basis of its design. "Solaris has
over 3,000 kernel locks. Whenever an OS gets that multi-threaded, you've
made a pact with the devil," McVoy said.
Kernel locks are safety checks that ensure exclusive use of a computer's
resources to one process. While this hurts performance, it prevents two
users from, say, working in the same file at the same time. Systems
designers employ artful measure to minimize the disruptive effects of
the locks on performance.
The power of Linux
One analyst agrees with McVoy that Linux may have advantages in clustering.
"The Linux kernel is simple and that is part of its strength," agrees
Dan Kusnetzky, server analyst at International Data Corp. (IDC). "It's
very fast and there's very little to go wrong with it in terms of
functional capability. The developer can develop pretty much what he
wants to."
At the same time, he says "it sounds like a very difficult thing to do."
Kusnetzky says that clustering has fallen in two religious camps:
"shared nothing" adopted by NCR, Tandem, and Microsoft, and "shared
everything", which relies on lock-management, and is the technology
adopted by Compaq and Oracle. Finding a middle ground has eluded many
architects, he said.
"If these people have come up with that scales to shared-nothing, but
with the ease of development and configuration that you see in
shared-everything, then they really have something. This would put Linux
leading the single-vendor-creator operating systems."
But only, he noted, if the new architecture doesn't require application
vendors to do major code rewrites.
Although scalable, such designs top out at 64 or 128 nodes, he says. The
LCC design seeks to avoid such a ceiling by levering memory access
capabilities used in symmetric multiprocessing (SMP).
The LCC architecture should minimize lock traffic in the region of
common, or 'global' memory shared between machines on the cluster. One
instance of the operating system is shared in a smaller unit, or
"domain," of 2 to 8 CPUs.
The Cabal's design will accommodate multiple users on multiple operating
systems all on the same cluster.
The design includes a VMS-style distributed lock manager, fail-over and
recovery, and load-balancing. The group is also working with
object-based storage vendors to incorporate advanced distributed file
system technology.
Potential market
The project has won approval from power users worried by SGI's decision
to sideline its Cray business.
"We in the high-performance computing community are very concerned about
the future," said Robert Lucas, a scientist at the U.S. Department of
Energy's Lawrence Livermore laboratory.
"While peak performance is going up, as is memory volume, by most other
measures, we're going backwards right now," he said. SGI (NYSE:SGI)
spent five years re-engineering the T3E [Cray], and is walking away from
it, he added.
Lucas said though an open-source solution was viable: "Checkpoint
[stopping a process and restarting it] and restart isn't going to be
high on Linus [Torvalds, Linux kernel administrator] agenda, but it's
top of ours."
But the Linux group must take heed of manageability features, warned
IDC's Kusnetzky. For typical commercial users, "hardware and software
costs combined are between 15 and 20 percent of the overall cost." The
rest is the cost of employing administrators.
Public documents from the LCC are expected before the end of 1999.
zdnet.com
Killer Downloads
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 1999
Don't Miss the Latest and Greatest Screen Savers
Jon C.A. DeKeles, Technical Director
ZDNet AnchorDesk
Sailors Life Screen Saver would be the perfect screen saver for Nicci --
if it had sailors in it. My mistake. But you might enjoy this
screensaver featuring various vessels cruising the Caribbean. Includes
lots of customization options. (Shareware/Win95-98-NT) Click for more.
The Monet: The Magic of Light Screen Saver features 20 great pieces from
the father of Impressionism. Including cityscapes, seascapes and
gardens. Just right for Jesse, AnchorDesk's resident art snob.
(Shareware/Win95-98-NT) Click for more.
Psychedelic Screen Saver will take Liz back to her college days with its
colorful whirls and swirls. Lots of options will keep you enthralled
with its mesmerizing patterns for hours. Also lets you synch music with
patterns. (Shareware/Win95-98-NT) Click for more. |
