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Just to follow this to its logical conclusion, the webserver may be running Apache or Nginx on Linux, but there are likely to be proprietary blobs in the drive
by jefurii 10y ago
Just to follow this to its logical conclusion, the webserver may be running Apache or Nginx on Linux,
but there are likely to be proprietary blobs in the drivers and the firmware is probably closed. Plus, much of the hosting company's networking hardware is probably running proprietary software.
IANANE (I Am Not A Network Engineer) but I imagine with open firmware like Coreboot and networking distros like Cumulus and pfSense (BSD) and the whole Open Compute Project it might be possible to run a completely open-source hosting company. Well, no. Your UPS's and other auxiliary hardware are probably running closed OSes. Darn.
- pgeorgi 10y agosomeone is (or was?) trying: https://www.vikings.net/ https://www.vikings.net/
- Spooky23 10y agoPerfect is the enemy of the good.
- mcpherrinm 10y agoCumulus contains a large portion of closed-source code, including all the driver code provided by Broadcom, which is where much of the interesting stuff happens. (I assume their Mellanox products are the same, though I'm not familiar with them) I'm not aware of any efforts to write open source drivers for any high speed ethernet chips, though I haven't looked much. Intel's (formerly Fulcrum) switch chips have open data sheets (but not the reference code, simulators, etc) so it would at least be plausible to start there.