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Feature: Open Source
Playboy spreads open source software
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Commentsmirrors.playboy.com is even an official mirror site for Firefox and Thunderbird, says Playboy Unix administrator Tim Yocum. He wanted to give something back to the community from which his company has drawn so deeply.
Yocum has been working for Playboy Enterprises since 2000, and was responsible for much of the company's move to open source software. All of playboy.com's application servers are running Apache on Red Hat ES, and Yocum is in the process of migrating the Web servers from Solaris on Sun hardware to Red Hat ES on Dell PowerEdge servers. He has been able to reduce the number of servers by about 50% and gain increased processor availability, disk capacity, and throughput, using Apache, Perl, and other open source software.
Playboy's corporate management has warmly welcomed Yocum's moves toward open source. They appreciate the cost savings and, Yocum says, display an attitude of "whatever works." The push toward open source, he says, comes from the bottom up; the real fans of Apache and Perl are the network administrators, including himself, and they are fortunate to have bosses who give them the freedom to use open alternatives.
When Yocum wanted to set up a mirror for the different types of open source software he'd made use of at playboy.com, chief technology officer Danielle Barcilon told him to go for it. "I cobbled together a box from spare parts," he says. The server sits on the network consuming unused bandwidth and so costs the company nothing.
Yocum says mirrors.playboy.com gets a steady stream of traffic, around 30-40MB each day. Users looking for Apache, Firefox, and Thunderbird downloads come mostly from the main Web sites for each program and are randomly directed to one of many mirror sites. Other visitors come from links around the Net, where word is starting to spread that open source devotees can get their jollies from a most unexpected source.
Tina Gasperson writes about business and technology from an open source perspective.
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on Playboy spreads open source softwareNote: Comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for their content.
Other stories I'd like to see are stories on how to do things with Linux, like update and patch since it's easy with Windows with Windows Update. Newsforge can slowly teach people how to move to Linux, and a lot of people are interested in doing it but need some hints.
1. Edit the apt sources.
2. Type in 'apt-get install dist-upgrade'
3. Hit enter.
4. Go do something else while it's doing it's magic.
5. Come back and enjoy.
Honestly, it would be great to show how systems can have cron'd apt-get, or yum, or up2date automatically keep systems up to date w/ the latest security patches...or not.
Running a home box that just updates is easy, but prod boxes normally can get real screwed up just applying every patch that comes along. take one simple recent change in libxml2 where an iso latin to utf conversion function kept the same signature API/ABI wise, but the behavior changed w/ non-zero numbers indicating success instead of zero. That can result in a startling array of busted apps when applied blindly...
Don't mock these poor people, lets help them join the fun...
If you don't care that much, do whatever you like.
(I was not assuming the rest of the linux world runs debian. Apt has been ported to rpm too, covering most distro's)
It's not just the savings on licenses over Windows and proprietary UNIX. It's the reduction in servers, increase in capacity, and reductions in system administration time and personnel - especially the latter. One less sys admin is $50-75,000 in savings a year.
And the reduction in complexity of the individual servers and overall server farms is a major component of reducing personnel and administration expenses.
If you don't take these things into account, your estimate of the TCO will be off and you will mistakenly believe Windows or Unix is cheaper.
Moores law does not say anything about performance, it addresses number of transistors. Doubling the number of transistors does not double the efficiency or throughput of a cpu. It would be nice of that were true but it isn't.
You are not disproving my point that the increase in capacity/decrease in number of servers is related to advances in hardware. As the article is scarce on technical details we may never know for sure. But I think that my explanation is a lot simpler, please apply ochams razor where you see fit.
This is how a project I'm involved with, OOoAuthors, gets its bandwidth (<a href="http://oooauthors.org/" title="oooauthors.org">http://oooauthors.org/</a oooauthors.org>). We get the unused bandwith from Digital Distribution (<a href="http://digitaldistribution.com/" title="digitaldistribution.com">http://digitaldistribution.com/</a digitaldistribution.com>) which is an open source-friendly company.
Cheers,
Daniel.
30-40 megabytes?
Posted by: muhgcee on June 07, 2005 03:14 AM#