Date: Thu, 08 Apr 1999 16:24:17 -0600 From: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> To: lbruno@data.com, datacomm@data.com Subject: Re: your April 7, 1999 article "Open-Source Software: Power to the People" Message-ID: <370D2C91.B650C342@softweyr.com>
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Mr. Lee Bruno, Data Communications Magazine Mr. Bruno, I read the referenced article with great interest and care. I am pleased to see such even and fair coverage of Open Source software, and am particularly pleased to see your mention of BSD systems, often overlooked by your colleagues in the popular computing press. It is often difficult to research articles such as this. In this article I will identify some developments your readers may need in order to make informed decisions about what BSD systems may do for them. Paid professional support is available for the FreeBSD operating system from FreeBSD Mall; details and pricing are available at http://www.freebsdmall.com/. Each of the Open Source BSD operating system groups also offers lists of consultants familiar with BSD systems; many of these can provide professional support on an individual basis as well. All are supported through the usual mail and web resources as mentioned in your article. Clustering is most certainly in the cards for FreeBSD as well. Several projects are working on various forms of clustering, and have stable reliable systems based on clustering technology. Simple server load balancing, a weak form of clustering, is available from the Eddieware project at http://www.eddieware.org/. The David Sarnoff Research Center has created a loosely coupled cluster of FreeBSD machines for parallel computational work; see the description at ftp://ftp.sarnoff.com/pub/mnfs/www/docs/cluster.html for more information about their parallel computing cluster. Both Linux and BSD systems support standard, open-source LDAP servers. Linux and FreeBSD also support PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) to enable user authentication via LDAP servers. While interoper- ability with NDS and AD is not guaranteed, it is certainly a goal of the developers of the LDAP PAM modules. Linux does have a 2 GByte filesystem, ext2fs, but this limitation does not hamper BSD systems; the ufs filesystem in 4.4BSD has supported large filesystem sizes--up to Exabyte capacity--for many years. Recent BSD systems have added softupdate support, which allows asynchronous updates of filesystem data in a much more resilient manner than the Linux ext2fs approach. This technology is present in FreeBSD 3.1 and OpenBSD 2.4. Also added to FreeBSD 3.1 is the Vinum Volume Manager, which allows administrators to add space from new disk drives to existing filesystems, and to replicate data across multiple physical disks for data security. These additions make BSD systems, and particularly FreeBSD, the best open source platforms for supporting large disk systems. For more information about Vinum see http://www.lemis.com/vinum.html. Information on FreeBSD is available at http://www.freebsd.org, on OpenBSD at http://www.netbsd.org, and on NetBSd at http://www.netbsd.org. Please feel free to contact me at the email address below if I may be of assistance in any way. -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC http://www.softweyr.com/~softweyr wes@softweyr.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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