Date: Wed, 12 May 1999 13:31:20 -0400 From: "James A. Mutter" <jm7996@devrycols.edu> To: GVB <gvbmail@tns.net>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: We are a growing ISP, need some advice! Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19990512133120.007d72a0@devrycols.edu> In-Reply-To: <4.1.19990512084359.00b66cd0@abused.com>
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At 08:51 AM 5/12/99 -0700, GVB wrote: >Hi there. I am a systems administrator for a small ISP in San Diego that is >rapidly growing. We offer basically all ISP services including dialup, >domain hosting, dedicated connections, etc. All of our servers are run off >of FreeBSD. That's a good thing. :) >Mail server is a PentiumII 233 with 384 megs of RAM running UW SCSI hard >drives. It is currently 2.2.8 with sendmail and Qpopper. >Our web server is a PentiumII 266 with 384 megs of RAM running UW SCSI hard >drives. It is currently 3.1 running Apache-ssl with Frontpage extensions. Seems like that could be overkill for a web server, unless you're relying heavily on server side includes or doing moderate to serious database work. >We have about 150 virtual domains running on the web server and about 800 >dialin accounts + the mail from all the virtual domains running off of that >one mail server. We are starting to see a definite need for a bigger >server farm. My question is, what should my growth point be from here, how >do I scale this thing to accomidate all the users and domains I am hosting, >because we are noticing the hardware starting to slow, the mail server >actually hits swap space, even with 384 megs of RAM in it. Why is this a problem? It's perfectly normal for FreeBSD to use swap, even when the machine is under a light load. I've seen mail servers with a load average > 10 using more swap than you have RAM and they're just fine. Remember, it's a only a mail server. I don't think that speed is something to be terribly concerned about. >I have read up on doing round robin DNS with the Web Servers, but never >really understood how the disks are synched up, does it run on NFS with one >machine serving the content? > >How about scaling the mail servers? Where can I read up on setting up >multiple mail/pop3 servers? What is the best solution to do this. Why? Again, your machines are doing just fine. Save your money for additional phone lines/bandwidth/advertising/etc... You really don't need a HW upgrade at this point. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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