steven n fettig's Jitterin' Thoughts

Why dare I put this entry into the category FreeBSD? Because, no matter what I do, I will always compare the OS I am working with against FreeBSD. That is because FreeBSD has ended up being the easiest and most stable operating system I have ever used to date. Yes, one of my entries from yesterday complained about the usability of FreeBSD as concerns a Desktop or Workstation, but that includes trying to use the machine for a multitude of purposes (other than just work). I also realized that for much of my schooling, I am really going to require a more main-stream OS to run programs like Mathematica.

Anyway, I had an interesting time with RedHat today that I would love an explanation for. I originally gave up the idea of using RedHat as my R&D webserver at Tankcraft because it runs Apache 2.0 and I have yet to really see 2.0 recommended for production use (which really translates to: you are going to have many a problem -- most of them odd -- with using Apache 2.0 and modules like php and perl), but I found out that I was the one to bungle things up with only God knows what (yes, quite the description, isn't it) and decided to start from square-one and re-install RH 8.0... and whadaya know? It worked. Once I had verified that I could indeed run some mySQL and PHP driven databases on the system, I put the machine on the R&D network at work and went to town... only to find out that the response time for pages served from the machine ridiculously slow for clients. It ran great on the localhost, but not on external workstations. When I say ridiculous, I mean ridiculous. It would take upwards of 30 seconds to serve a 2 Kb page... This sounded like something I had encountered in the past on a private network -- reverse lookups slowing the whole process down. The only thing is, that I had reverse lookups turned off in the Apache 2.0 httpd.conf and the problem persisted. I decided after fooling with cables and numerous restarts (I was convinced it was something having to do with the network at that point in time) that I would populate hosts with reverse lookups of the machines I was using to access the server and voila, it worked like a charm. I am still haunted by the fact that this shouldn't be... something in the server is requiring names to be resolved, but I don't know what. I am almost starting to wonder if it is the fault of php or even the scripting for the DB I am testing (which I didn't write, but modified). Anyway, if anyone actually took enough time to read this and has a clue... well, drop me a line. The link to my email is in the column to the right of all of this.

Suffice it to say, I am somewhat frustrated... this doesn't take away from my resolve, however, to rid my world of Windows. I'm just plain sick of dealing with the bloat and baggage that comes along with using that OS. Oh, well, for the time being, I'm stuck with it...