Re: Interesting Upgrade

["Hank" <hankster@xxxxxxxxxx>]

There are some static parts of the pages, but much of it is dynamically
generated.

I was able to talk with the newly hired IT manager and one of his conditions
of being hired was for them to make the switch. Just my feeling is the ex-IT
manager is no longer with them because he insisted on using IIS and it was
just not able to scale up to the traffic the site was getting.

The way the switch was made is the present site that was running IIS was
duplicated on the Unix boxes and tested. Once it was all set, they just
broadcast the IP addresses for the new servers. There was some "weirdness"
over the next two days or so as the IP was spread, most likely caused as
some page were served from the Unix boxes and other pages came from the IIS
servers.

I suspect the boxes were leased and I do some work for the company involved.
Luckily, all my own clients are using Unix boxes, so all content I had there
used Unix file name and path conventions. Biggest problem we had was that
some people used upper and lower case letters in file/path names. Since IIS
doesn't worry about file/path name case (MyFile.htm is the same as
myfile.htm), some links were broken.

Hank




----- Original Message -----
From: Adam Williams <awilliam@whitemice.org>
To: <klug@klug.armintl.com>
Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 1999 11:40 PM
Subject: Re: Interesting Upgrade


> On Oct 12,  5:26pm, Hank wrote:
> > Subject: Interesting Upgrade
> > I've been away to a 4 day conference and just got back. It is
interesting to
> > note that a top 25 Internet web site has just canned MS IIS for
> > FreeBSD/Apache.
> >
> > According to the new IT head, they dropped from a 100 box server farm
> > running at 100% load to under 6 machines running at low load. Half of
those
> > 100 boxes where there just as mirror machines so the site would be
> > accessible when the main servers went down.
>
> HOLY SNIKES!!!  Is this confirmed?  I find it pretty hard to believe an OS
> change made that much diffrence.  We're they serving static pages (I doubt
it)
> or some database enabled content?  And if so did this OS change happen
> concurrently with any backend changes?  I'm very curious about this claim,
and
> are they looking to sell some of those 95 boxes good and cheap?
>