07/19/2000

Frontier: Search Engine Indexer Optimizations. Macs especially get a major speed boost.

Sheila redesigned her site. A cleaner, more confident look. Colorful and fun. Sheila says: "Rock 'n' Roll!"

Seattle scored three runs in the ninth last night to win the rubber match of the three game set against NL West leading Arizona CryingBacks. Next up is division rivals the Oakland A's.

This is prompted by a note on the Frontier discussion group. "I'd rather not use Apple hardware for this since my experience with Apple and webserving is a lot of crashes," writes Andreas Hellstrom.

My story: I have a Mac 8500 which had a problem a couple years ago. It was a very light-duty server, running Mac OS. It developed a problem -- about a minute after booting up, it would freeze, hard.

I took it into the shop. They replaced the hard drive. I completely re-installed the system software, re-installed the couple apps it needed to run. The problem resurfaced. I tried lots of different combinations to see if it would stop freezing. Nothing worked. I've been running Mac servers since 1995; I have a clue about how to keep these things up.

Then, figuring I had nothing to lose, I installed LinuxPPC on it. It was that or throw the machine away. First surprise: the machine actually made it through the install process. Second surprise: it stayed up.

The only restarts since that time have been deliberate -- to upgrade Linux, or just because I feel like it's a good idea to restart once or twice a year. (Okay, a couple restarts were the result of power failures, but now it's on UPS.)

Lesson learned. It's not necessarily the hardware. In fact, my impression is that Apple's hardware far outshines its OS. Maybe that will change with OS X. All I ask of OS X is that be as stable as LinuxPPC and make a good server.

{staticText ("This page is served by that very same Mac 8500.")}

Daniel, replying to the above, writes, "All I ask of OS X it be as stable as Linux PPC, make a good server, and be as easy to admin as my current MacOS servers."

Excellent point. But I actually prefer Linux admin to Mac OS admin. Compare adding a virtual host using the WebSTAR Admin program to editing Apache's configuration file in emacs. Maybe I'm perverse, or just weird, but I'd rather edit the damn text file. It's quicker, and I know it's right.

Or, maybe I have to do a few things -- some DNS admin, some HTTP server admin, etc. -- it's so much easier from the command line than launching first one GUI admin app, then another, maybe having to launch remote control software, maybe not. It's just too much screwing around when I could be typing.

That said, what I really prefer is browser-based admin. If I could have one place to go to do everything -- that would be a dream. Check out the Cobalt Qube.