Date: Sun, 4 Jan 1998 10:10:09 -0600 (CST) From: "Stephen D. Spencer" <lists@artorius.sunflower.com> To: Lukas Wunner <lukas@design.de> Cc: =?iso-8859-1?Q?=22Luis_E=2E_Mu=F1oz=22?= <lem@cantv.net>, freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: [fbsd-isp] Designing for a very large ISP Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980104093814.11451C-100000@artorius.sunflower.com> In-Reply-To: <19980104141146.32430@reactor>
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On Sun, 4 Jan 1998, Lukas Wunner wrote: > Hi, > > > During the first year, it'll have to support some 100000 users. > > Of course, we've already chosen FreeBSD as the core OS for this > > after looking to Digital Unix, Solaris and Windows NT. > > My suggestion would be to look at an SGI Origin 200/2000 or Sun U2 box > instead of a PC box running FreeBSD. Hrm... > We have experienced severe problems > with PCs wrt expandability/scalability. E.g., we currently have 256MB of > RAM in our news box but would love to go to 512MB, but the motherboard > is not capable of doing that although the documentation and the webpages > state the contrary (it's a Tyan Tomcat III or IV). I will put in an anti-plug for SGI machines as internet servers: for base price + cost of "approved SGI hardware" + price of the C compiler (so one can compile updated ip servers such as INND, BIND, Sendmail, popper, etc...) + time required to vodoo the said software into compiling on Irix 6.x, we could have purchased a seperate PC to receive news for each of the major seven usenet trees. I've had aweful 3rd party vendor support for extra equipment (had a 4 gig external die on our Indy running INND and found out that it costs $400 (non refundable) for Falcon (an approved SGI 3rd party drive vendor) to drop ship a new drive. "Approved" 3rd party (kingston) 32 meg SIMMs cost around $280 a piece) Other problems I've had with the SGI platform: they have two speeds when it comes to correcting internal security holes--slow and stop--anyone remember exactly when the xlock and xdm buffer overflows were first reported? (If you run IRIX, forget about offering shell access to anyone outside your local admin ring) > If you want to go to > something like 1GB or 2GB of RAM, you're stuck with a PC. The only > solution seem to be PPro based machines, but the chipsets available so > far are really ugly wrt memory and PCI performance in my opinion (as > compared to good old Pentium based boards). [interesting information brevitized ;)] > > Experience also has shown that usually you have to invest more time > into getting a PC based server running as compared to a machine which > was designed from scratch to be a high performance/bandwidth server > like the SGI Origin 2000, and time is money (I have spent *several* hours > trying to get the Tomcat board running with more than 256MB of RAM). > Hmmm... when was the last time you had to reload/configure an IRIX system? I would suggest looking into a high-performance server system (Sun or DEC Alpha) running Open or NetBSD if you're concerned with fancy hardware. Otherwise, do lots of research into PC hardware and accept the fact that you will have a few more machines laying about. You might also want to contact someone at Walnut creek to inquire about their hardware. My 2 cts... Regards, Stephen ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Stephen Spencer finger gladiatr@artorius.sunflower.com for - - administrator PGP key. - - Sunflower Datavision http://www.sunflower.com - -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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