10.5 Operating Systems

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10.5 Operating Systems

The operating system may or may not be a deciding factor in your particular situation. With an appliance, you don't have to worry about the operating system at all. A software product, however, requires that you manage the operating system yourself. This probably includes tasks such as adding users, monitoring disk usage, and applying security patches.

Some organizations start with the operating system as a requirement and then look for products that run on it. For example, if you run Windows NT on all of your systems, you probably want to find an NT-based caching proxy. In other cases, your hardware determines your operating system. Sun hardware almost always runs Solaris, SGI hardware runs IRIX, and so on. A number of choices exist for Intel-based systems, however. You can run one of many freely available Unix systems, such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Linux. There are a number of commercial PC Unix systems also, including BSD/OS, SCO, and Solaris. And, of course, there's always Microsoft Windows.

If you do have a number of operating system choices, you may want to consider some of the following characteristics:

Robustness

Since your cache is a production service, you don't want the machine to crash at random times. However, it may be hard to find quantitative robustness data for various operating systems. Coworkers and mailing lists are a good source for this information.

Security

It goes without saying that your proxy must be as secure as possible at all times. All operating-system vendors should be good at providing security fixes in a timely manner. You may want to browse or search the Bugtraq archives (http://www.securityfocus.com/bugtraq/archive) to see if one is better than the other. OpenBSD (http://www.openbsd.org) has a strong focus on building a very secure operating system.

Manageability

You should select an operating system that you find easy to administer. Some people prefer to use point-and-click tools, while others are perfectly comfortable with command lines.

Support

You might want to think about how you'll get support for your operating system, such as answers to technical questions, bug fixes, and updates. In some cases, the operating system may be sold without any form of support. Freely available operating systems tend to have self-supporting user communities, but a number of companies provide support for Linux and BSD variants as well.

Performance

Operating systems may have slightly different performance characteristics, especially regarding file systems.

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