netbsd-advocacy: NetBSD and my life...
Subject: NetBSD and my life...
To: None
From: gary rolland
List: netbsd-advocacy
Date: 09/10/2005 16:40:17<br>Hello NetBSD Team,
I have been using NetBSD for about two years on my laptop and never<br>had any problems. I use this laptop in work and at home. I knew NetBSD<br>was capable of much more, and I was hell bent on using it at work too!
The main reason for this email is to let you guys know what we mainly<br>use NetBSD for - supporting over 4,800 heavy users (some remote) and<br>counting. It's my story about what NetBSD has done for my life, and<br>how it has actually improved my personal life. I hope you will enjoy<br>it and that it'll offer further encouragement to continue the truly<br>excellent work.
I'll start off by introducing myself. My name is Gary Rolland and I<br>live in the United Kingdom. I work in a team consisting of three other<br>network admins. We all work for a large UK based company. Our task is<br>to keep the servers up and to do maintenance. We work on shifts and<br>can be called out at any time, night or day. We are not responsible<br>for the client machines within the buildings. Sadly, I am unable to<br>disclose the actual company name. I received permission to give you<br>information about what we use NetBSD for and that only (I begged<br>infact). Our network is mission critical - down time costs the company<br>mega money. I certainly would not want to foot the bill!
(Note: I have also been told not to disclose network infrastructure in<br>great detail. If you have any comments/questions, please do ask. I'll<br>try my best to answer them the best I can)
Currently, our network consists of 29 high end servers. They all run<br>NetBSD 2.0.2 and deal with extremely high loads. The servers handle:
- MySQL databases - This makes up most of our traffic/resource usage.
- Apache - Internal and external
- Postfix - Interval and external email=20
- Samba - Allow the 4,800 users to connect to the NFS.
(Note: Our file servers are connected to NetBSD. So it's like=20<br>Users->NetBSD->File server. Our file servers run Linux. Am not allowed<br>to touch them! However, the email and httpd data is stored directly on<br>the NetBSD servers. Just for your information, our file servers go<br>down more than our servers;-))
Data facts(avg. per day):
- NetBSD pushes over 870GB of data per day.<br>- NetBSD pushes about 1,200 emails per day (not always work related. I<br>have seen joke emails a while back with 12MB attachments! (12MB x 4500<br>:()).<br>- NetBSD during peak hours, our httpd servers can deal with 35<br>requests per minute(internal and external). The website is wrote in<br>pretty heavy PHP (and bad PHP, but that's not my call).
Originally our network servers used Windows, running on more older<br>hardware than we have now. We have recently been through an upgrade.
I can describe my admining of Windows as a complete f*cking nightmare.<br>I was constantly worrying over when they would fall over. Here is a<br>small story:
I had been promising my 12 year old daughter and her friend that I<br>would take them to Alton Towers. The night before we had planned to<br>go, I raced into the server rooms and checked everything was running.<br>I was happy things would be OK, because I was on call out the next day<br>and I couldn't let my daughter down again(this has happened more than<br>once). We was having a great time at Alton Towers and the worst thing<br>happened. My work phone starts to ring. My daughters face just<br>dropped, she knew exactly what was coming next.
Boss: 'Gary, servers have all dropped to their knees. I need you here now.'<br>Me: 'Sure, I'll be there in a few hours' (in a 'am going to kill<br>someone voice').
It really upset me to see my daughter let down again, including a<br>friend. They had been talking about going all week and Microsoft<br>Windows of all things messes everything up.
Here I am, speeding up the motorway. My daughter completely pissed<br>off, and for due reasons to. This has happened many other times<br>before. I was even getting abit ratty at home since I'd be thinking of<br>anything which could go wrong. This also lead to more arguments with<br>the wife (which leads to a decrease in other things... ;)
I knew something had to change.
After I had fixed the problem, I stormed into my bosses office and<br>explained we need more admins or need to change our servers. Cut a<br>long story short, he allowed me to trial test two of our servers on<br>NetBSD. He didn't know anything about it - just that I promised him I<br>could increase the stability by a huge margin without disrupting<br>business.
That day I was in a mood to change things(pissed), and so I took two<br>servers home. One was what we call a 'MySQL' server and one httpd<br>server(the bosses go nuts if the httpd goes down).
I had no room to fail.
I was up till 4 AM in the morning installing and configuring things to<br>our exact needs. NetBSD as always installed flawlessly and I<br>installed most required software from pkgsrc.
I roled these machines into the network in the morning. I knew I had<br>to wait now,...