Hi,

My hosting company uses an IRIX OS (Unix). Is this a good/popular OS?

I was just told it"s very rare but my hosting company RapidSite (Verio Group) is a very huge company. Why would they choose the IRIX OS if in fact it is very rare?

Simon.

Could be that the security holes in it are less known, which would make it a lot less of a security risk than RedHat etc, which is very widely used, so a lot of hackers concentrate on finding holes in this system, and normally miss out the smaller ones.

Just an idea.. I don't know for sure

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

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I thought IRIX had been 'officialy' discontinued?

- wil

Hi,

It's not very popular at all compared to Linux or BSD. I'm not even sure if it runs on x86 (Intel/AMD) hardware, but rather only on SGI machines. Probably using it because the techs who designed the system was most familiar with it.

Hosting companies today typically use either Linux or BSD, primarily because the hardware is readily available and a lot cheaper.

Cheers,

Alex
--
Gossamer Threads Inc.

IRIX is SGIs version of UNIX, a very reliable operating system. It is much like Sun Microsystems have Solaris which is based on AT&Ts System V Release 4 UNIX operating system, as opposed to the Berkley (BSD) version, or LINUX, although all have simillar roots.

I know someone who had a HP-UX machine that never crashed or had to be restarted for 8 years, and that was only because he moved house, so a web host running any *NIX operating system should have very reliable systems, and SGI servers are VERY reliable! If you can find a host running on SGI, HP, IBM or Sun UNIX servers and they're a reasonable price I would go for it, this proprietary hardware is usually 64-Bit and incredibly reliable so uptime should be good. Chances are they will be running MySQL for your databases, PHP for scripted pages and Apache web server too so you've got some damn good software behind it too.

As for IRIX being discontinued, as I understand it, SGI have the Altix range which have Intel Itanium 2 CPUs which run a production-quality LINUX but all the MIPS hardware uses IRIX still, including the new kit.