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Debian

eBay Chooses Debian for Wireless Servers 58

Posted by CmdrTaco from the linux-in-the-real-world dept.
molo writes "According to Nils Lohner of the Debian press team, eBay and Workspot have chosen Debian with Apache and Perl for their wireless servers. Workspot also explains their reasons and their setup. "
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eBay Chooses Debian for Wireless Servers More

eBay Chooses Debian for Wireless Servers

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  • heh (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Gotta love those snazzy PowerPoint presentations.

  • In some countries now you can pay for things using wireless technology. Usually a PCS phone or something: a note comes up asking whether you accept a charge, you say yes or not, and it appears on your next phonebill.

    Some places let you buy stuff from vending machines, and you can order pizzas, pay for stuff in stores... merchants just assume that everyone has some kind of intelligent wireless device.

    This stuff is going to reach a critical mass soon, and it's going to be big. It's great to see that Linux/Debian/GNU is breaking ground here--it's the way of the future.

  • why apache? (Score:3)

    by Haven ( 34895 ) on Monday November 08, 1999 @09:07AM (#1551752) Homepage Journal
    I started noticing that major companies like Amazon.com [amazon.com] and ebay [ebay.com] started switching some of their servers to apache after microsoft released their pricing scheme for Win2k. I'm not sure if these large e-commerce sites really want to pay thousands of dollars in licensing for each server for the win2k upgrades. I'm sure they don't also want to pay that $1000+ license for having a "largish" web site per server. I think win2k will be the downfall of microsoft.
  • The topic was a question, and the post was the answer. Just a clarification.

  • Except for an older version of mySQL that was relicensed, mySQL does not meet the Open Source Definion, and is not open source software.

    As for your comments about Solaris not scaling -- I believe they're unfounded. The only problem I can find with Solaris scalability is the price tag. Those ultra enterprise boxes aren't cheap, and Solaris runs like a dog on anything less.

  • a true leak (Score:4)

    by workspot ( 112076 ) on Monday November 08, 1999 @09:17AM (#1551757)
    hi. this was not an official ebay announcement. word got out because we thanked the engineers at debian. which we do gratefully. we're a debian gnu/linux shop, who happen to work with ebay. the use of free software, the best stuff in our opinion, was OUR decision, not ebay's. cheers -- workspot

  • Re:heh (Score:1)

    by BrianS ( 522 )
    $120! Where do you shop? A decent home/office scanner can be had for half that at around $60. You can't even get the OS to run Powerpoint for that much!

  • Guess what now it is. Kinda sorta:) I wish Drovak had his email address available to the public, oh well.

    Ian

  • Re:EBAY KNOWS WHAT TIME IT IS... (Score:3)

    by technos ( 73414 ) on Monday November 08, 1999 @09:26AM (#1551760) Homepage Journal
    Hey now! I'm as Gnu/Linux'y as the next /.'er, but at least I'll have the guts to say that Sun makes a good product. The OS may be slower than some others, but it's solid, stable, and not buggy in the least. The hardware, with a few exceptions (Cough.. HME.. Cough..) is also quite good. As for the Sun scalability issue, it scales well. (I won't go so far to say it scales better than Linux, because I don't have my asbestos long-johns with me).
    Do you have some sort of inherent grudge against Oracle? Oracle is slower than many other DB's, but it is by design. Oracle takes great lengths to make everything is pristine; it is one of the factors one considers when selecting a DB.

  • Oracle releases first on Solaris. If a database as sound as Oracle released first on Debian, Linux would dominate the back-end and Sun would be competing toe-to-toe with Intel in the hardware business ...
  • Geez, I've been wondering why eBay has had so many problems with keeping their systems up, and now I understand why. They shouldn't have to go with this proxy kind of architecture. If they had a well structured back end, which seperated presentation from the rest of the applicaiton, they'd write a new presentation layer which spoke directly to the back end, instead of having the overhead of their main servers generating the HTML and then the proxy server parsing it and generating new HTML.
  • According to this article these new Palm proxies will be standing IN FRONT of the web site site, parsing the HTML and generating more "compact" HTML for Palm.
  • Paying for things using wireless phones started off as a gimmink in Scandanavian countries but is starting to spread all over Europe - I've seen the vending machines in the UK. BTW, it's done using GSM phones, PCS is just a North American thing - they don't work anywhere else.

    Nick

  • I know WAP is yet to become popular, but I believe it's a well designed mechanism for devices with limited resources to access information. It's structured in a similar way to HTML, and standards-based. There will be a lot of different Internet appliances similar to Palm VII, Qualcomm pdQ and the like, and if each of them uses a different subset or a different "simplified" dialect of HTML, we developers will have a tough time.

    I predict WAP will explode in Europe this Spring, when new GSM handsets with WAP capabilities hit the market and those creative Scandinavians find zillions of new ways of employing WAP in e-commerce. I guess the US will follow, and then all major e-commerce sites/companies will have to design WAP versions of their sites anyway. I understand they have to cater to the Palm VII crowd now, but Palm should see the light and release a WAP browser for Palm VII soon. I guess it will be a lot easier for everyone when all vendors standardize on WAP.

  • PCS is just a buzzword meaning digital phone. I live in North America and have a PCS phone using GSM technology. Microcell in Canada. There are a variety of US GSM providers as well. Not as common as TDMA/CDMA but I figure with 700 million Europeans advancing the standard GSM is going to carry the day in the end.
  • Amen. What a hideous cludge and sad excuse for an architecture. I can understand the motivation for a translator or IBM's transcoder product for a site with massive amounts of static content they don't want to convert, but eBay?

    If anybody in this world has the money to spend and the reason to spend it on a good architecture it is eBay.(They lost, what, $5B in market cap due to their recurring crashes?)

    Separating presentation from business logic has been standard software architecture practice since the MVC pattern in Smalltalk, 1988. Do they think that this doesn't apply to the Web, or do they just not think at all about architecture?

    Where is eBay's head? Maybe mod_perl is the right tool for the job they're doing, but they're DOING THE WRONG JOB.

    Market confidence doesn't give you instant knowledge of how to architect a large scale software system, but it does give you the money to get people who can. I noticed that Amazon had a big booth at OOPSLA last week doing recruiting, and was sending their staff to lots of seminars and tutorials. eBay didn't seem to be around. Which company's stock would I recommend?

  • Linux does not scale as well as solaris does on big boxes. Hardware-wise and OS-wise Solaris running an a Quad CPU SUN E450 will eat alife _anything_ that was made by intel no matter what OS it runs or how many processors it has. And E450 is a relatively small SUN box, the E3500,E5500 scale aup to 16 processors and the famous "Starfire" SUN E10000 can have up to 64 processors, dozens of gigs of ram, etc. Microsft, Linux or Intel can't touch sun on the high end ...
  • You're an idiot. I wonder why I am even bothering replying to your post. When you find a open source DB as stable and as scalable as Oracle and when you can find an open source OS that will efficiently run a 8 to 64 CPU boxes with dozens of gigabytes of RAM, you can rant, otherwise just shut up.
  • The proxy server is a factor of the Palm VII architecture, not of EBay. It reads HTML from the internet and generates palm-proprietary "CML"[1] to send out over BellSouth's wireless network. Yes, CML is pretty funky, but there is definitely a need for a proxy server between the internet and the wireless net. And the funkier CML is, the better a thing it is that it's all modularized by 3com's proxy, rather than having EBay talk directly onto the BellSouth's network.


    [1]C is for compact, and ML is for nothing at all since this is not a markup language at all. Basically, a funky thing that takes all the HTML tags, throws away anything too complicated for the low-bandwidth connection, makes sure everything else is strictly nested, then compresses it all using a manually defined compression scheme.

  • Hilarious! Bravo! Should be a foot icon. (Score:3)

    by brad.hill ( 21936 ) on Monday November 08, 1999 @12:02PM (#1551782)
    This company is brilliant. eBay wants to deliver their app to the Palm platform, so they come in with a bid to put a Perl regex layer in the middle of everything as a translator. HAHAAHAAHAHAAHAHA!!! *wipes tears from eyes*

    --Cut to a smoke filled room....

    We'll get the bid because our solution is quick-n-dirty. No software costs, just toss it out in Perl. We can just put in a good all nighter and get it working! We'll come in miles under those other bids for cost and schedule.

    But a week down the road, eBay changes or adds a page and the damn thing breaks. They go to fix it, but it's all horribly obfuscated Perl and regexes. External consultants and internal programmers alike recoil in horror at it. Who can fix it? We can! We built the thing, afer all. We can charge ever higher maintenance fees as more and more users depend on our brittle piece of junk. The code will never be stable! Every change eBay makes will ripple down into our layer. Woo hoo!! Jackpot! A lifetime of suckling at the eBay teat!

  • How can this be a leak if Workspot had a webpage [workspot.com] describing the solution?

    Seems like public knowledge to me.

  • a 'workspot', as we think of it, is a linux desktop you can use through a browser. it's server-side computing, including software rental, with a linux interface. store your stuff on it, run your applications on its vnc connection, serve up web sites. that's the idea. desktop.com, and a lot of similar things, have their own interfaces. "why not just use linux as is?" we asked ourselves. we hope to prod more people to port software to linux, and work on the ui generally, by offering a bigger market -- net surfers. we're just getting started here -- please be gentle.
  • :We can just put in a good all nighter and
    :get it working!

    exactly... first to market. Perl is a great rapid development platform. get your idea prototyped first and running while everyone else waits for $LARGE_SOFTWARE_COMPANY's $PORTAL_SOLUTION or $WIRELESS_EVERYTHING_IN_A_BOX software to be finished, debugged, beta tested...

    :We can charge ever higher maintenance fees as
    :more and more users depend on our brittle piece of junk
    lemme guess... you're a contract Windows NT support person?

    okay, flames aside, I'll grant you that one-off apache-php-perl-$DATABASE solutions can easily become unmanageable, and there's probably more than a few companies who had their guru leave and weren't able to maintain their site.

    I see that as their fault for not documenting everything, or requiring the developers to document it.

    Perl's not the right choice for everything, but it's great for rapid deployment since you can use so much existing code. Nobody's forcing anybody to use PERL to beat their competitors to the market...
  • it's not secret or anything. it can't be, since anyone can see what's running on the servers. we just wanted to make it clear that this was no press release. especially not an ebay one.
  • yup, PCS stands for Personal Cellular Service. Can't get much more generic than that....
  • they usually don't get fed quacamole :-)

    Don't feed the trolls.

  • What does Ebay actually run on? (Score:3)

    by TurkishGeek ( 61318 ) on Monday November 08, 1999 @01:39PM (#1551793)
    I've seen several notes which mention Ebay's instability problems and the use of Solaris/Oracle on Ebay. There is no doubt the database servers are very critical, but it looks like the application logic itself runs on NT & IIS. I had my own share of frustration with Ebay services in the past, and I believe the database was not to blame. Look at this URL:

    http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem& item=555555555

    (I made the item number up, but this is the correct form of URL to look up an item)

    I know most server-side programming techniques allow aliases for server side apps/objects (i.e. I can write a Java servlet and call it "whateverISAPI.dll"), but the URL suggests that Ebay application logic is nothing but a bunch of ISAPI DLLs written for use with IIS. I would guess Ebay applications are written as ISAPI filters using MS Visual C++, and run on MS Windows NT servers running IIS. Or they have a really good reason to use another technology and call the program "ebayISAPI.dll".

    Does anyone here know what Ebay runs on? Can anyone verify my guess, which I believe is pretty obvious to many Slashdotters.
  • You are on crack. I don't care how much flaming I get, but Solaris and Oracle could and can easily nail Linux to the floor. I have been running both a Linux and Intel Solaris 7 for many, many months now and Linux cannot even begin to compete with Solaris in scalability, stability, or shear power than a properly used Sun box can deliver. If they were really interested in power, why didn't they go with an IBM RS/6000 server or an IBM AS/400. These are the true database powerhouses. Fact in point.
  • Back when Linux didn't have a decent presentation
    package, Linus T wold do his presentations about
    Linux useing MS Powerpoint.

    The moral ? Everything has it's purpose ( except
    NT Server ).
  • While this is probably off-topic, let me just say that workspot.net is one of the neater applications I've seen on the web in a long time.

    For those who don't know and haven't visited, workspot gives you the standard "stash your filez here" interface, but...there's this intriguing little tab up top labeled "Linux Desktop." You click on it, and are asked for the screen geometrics you want to use. A quick click later, and you're looking at a KDE desktop! Through the magic of AT&T's VNC [att.com] Java viewer, you get your very own KDE session, where you can do whatever you'd normally do on a "regular" Linux box and account.

    This is very neat, and I think I'll kill another hour playing with it.

    --------------------

  • amazon.com doesn't care about a $1000 plus license. A quick check on Yahoo shows their market cap at 26+ billion, with revenue of 355 Million dollars. The only reasons that they would use in picking a server are speed, reliability, and what it does for their public image. I doubt that they are running more than several hundred servers, making the licensing chump change if win2k actually worked better. I imagine that the ability to look at the source and make the changes that they need to make is more important than the cost of running the server or os.
  • Nice to see free software, once again, as part of the back-end middleware solution, but how about supporting wireless *clients* using Linux?

    There is a driver for Mobitex modems(*) that gives you datalink through network layer capabilities; so we at least have the hardware support.
    ---
    * written by guess who. ;)

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