Published: April 06, 2006 10:15 am         

Letters to the Editor - April 6, 2006

To the Editor:

I just read your story concerning the exchange between me and Mr. Taylor. I would like to point out some things.

1. CentOS had no relationship with Mr. Taylor or the city of Tuttle, nor did we have any obligation to solve a totally local problem concerning name lookup and name resolution that had nothing to do with our operating system or the CentOS Project.

2. Mr. Taylor did not ask for help, he demanded it. That MIGHT have been fine if he were a paying customer, but he was not. I have been in the computer service industry for many years and I have never had someone be as rude or demanding as Mr. Taylor, even if they were paying for the help.

3. Had Mr. Taylor asked for help and not accused the CentOS Project of a felony (breaking into his website and installing software), I would have gladly helped him. Mr. Taylor obtained help IN SPITE OF his outrageous comments ... not BECAUSE of them. Mr Taylor did not provide the name of his current provider nor his previous provider, he also did not provide the previous web address or explain that they had shifted providers. All these things I had to figure out on my own to help him. All he provided was rude accusations and threats of the FBI.

4. This issue was clearly a name server issue, in that the IP address for www.cityoftuttle.org was being returned for www.tuttle-ok.gov. It should have taken 5 seconds to do:

nslookup www.cityoftuttle.org

nslookup www.tuttle-ok.gov

(on both an affected and non-affected machine)

The resulting IP addresses would have easily shown the problem in less than a minute. Then looking at what DNS servers the two local machines were using would have told you, in less than 5 minutes exactly what the problem was and how to fix it.

As an outside person, I had no access to any of this. I also had no information to be able to solve this problem. Any person with any network experience should have been able to solve this simple problem ... which had nothing to do with the operating system on any of the computers involved.

5. Mr. Taylor says: “[CentOS is] a free operating system that this guy gives away, which tells you how much time he’s got on his hands.”

This shows a total misunderstanding of Open Source software and CentOS. Here are some points about open source software.

1. There are millions of people all over the world using Open Source software as their operating system (Linux and BSD are both open source). Some names of open source software include Fedora Core, Ubuntu, SuSE, CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, Gentoo, KNOPPIX, Mandriva, Slackware, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD ... just to name a few. The people who produce these products make a quality operating system. It’s not because “they have too much time on their hands,” it’s just that they have chosen a different business model and copyright method. In the 21st century, Mr. Taylor’s outdated view of Open Source software is unbelievable.

2. Apache, a open source (and free) webserver that runs on both Linux and MS Windows, hosts about 75% of all the websites on the Internet. In fact, the Tuttle Times is hosted on Apache and a version of Linux. So is Google, Yahoo.

3. CentOS is designed to be used in the enterprise. It is maintained by 11 developers from all over the world:

http://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=2

CentOS is the 8th largest Linux operating system when ranked by web servers installed on the Internet. CentOS has about 100,000 active web servers online in a November Netcraft survey:

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/12/05/strong_growth_for_debian.html

Web servers is only one aspect of what CentOS does, we are also used as database servers, application servers, files servers, SMB servers, and as a desktop operating system. Please see these article concerning what can be done on CentOS:

http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/65/Linux_Magazine_DVD_Inlay.pdf

http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/65/CentOS_4.2.pdf

CentOS finished 2nd in the 2005 Linux Journal Readers’ Choice Awards:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8520

CentOS has 20 internal servers that we maintain (5 in the EU, 15 in the US) just to distribute our updates to our external public mirrors which are nearly 100 machines all over the world:

http://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=13

We have had more than 1 million unique machines that have done updates against the CentOS update servers within the last year. CentOS has between 70,000 and 100,000 unique machines that do updates against our update servers every week. We serve about 30 Terabytes of information from our 20 distribution servers per month, or about 1 Terabyte of information per day. CentOS also has a website, http://www.centos.org. Our website gets an average of 20,000 unique visitors, serves 75,000 pages, has 618,477 hits and sends 2.90 Gb of information DAILY. That has nothing to do with distributing our updates, that is just our web traffic to the website. There are many open source projects around the world that take centos and build their product on top if it (with CentOS as their base):

http://www.centos.org/modules/news/index.php?storytopic=11

I just wanted you to understand that CentOS is not just a handful of people and there are an estimated 350,000 active CentOS machines currently all over the world.

Thanks,

Johnny Hughes

CentOS-4 Lead Developer