From owner-freebsd-isp Mon Jan 8 11:37:38 1996 Return-Path: owner-isp Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id LAA00224 for isp-outgoing; Mon, 8 Jan 1996 11:37:38 -0800 (PST) Received: from pelican.com (pelican.com [134.24.4.62]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id LAA00212 for ; Mon, 8 Jan 1996 11:37:28 -0800 (PST) Received: by pelican.com (Smail3.1.29.1 #10) id m0tZNMf-0000SMC; Mon, 8 Jan 96 11:36 PST Message-Id: Date: Mon, 8 Jan 96 11:36 PST From: pete@pelican.com (Pete Carah) To: adf@fl.net.au Subject: Re: Would like your opinion In-Reply-To: <199601052232.JAA17229@imp.fl.net.au> Cc: isp@freebsd.org Sender: owner-isp@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk In article <199601052232.JAA17229@imp.fl.net.au> adf writes: >Someone else wrote: >>I'm new to this list and new to FreeBSD. Some friends and I are >>getting ready to start providing internet service to our community >>and would like any suggestions you may have. >>We figure on starting small and growing (hopefully). 56k line to >>start, with 5 lines coming in. >>FreeBSD running on a: >>Pentium 100 >>16 meg ram >>1 gig scsi hard drive >>4X CD rom drive. >>Does this look like a good basic system to start with? Is that >>enough memory? >>I would appreciate any hints, and please forgive my ignorance. >Are you planning on bringing in a full or partial news feed? I would suggest a 4GB drive as a proxy caching and news spool. Well, at clubnet and interworld we're using 3 3g drives for news and still can't keep 10 days of some alt groups :-) Remember to add the '-l' flag to expire if you're spreading news across filesystems. (between Christmas and New Year's we got 650mb/day of alt alone for several days in a row; it's tapered off for now to a "sane" 350...) INN "can" run in a 16m machine but then nothing else will (I've done this on an SGI :-(. We run INN and apache (with 14 alias/virtual hosts now) on the same (P120 FreeBSD) system at clubnet with no problems (in 32m ram), but the web hit rate is still pretty low. If it starts creeping up we'll split that off. (try www.turkeyrack.com or www.macom-phi.com for an example :-) A "good" 486 running INN can keep up with a T1 easily if you don't have more than 2 or 3 big feeds. The thing that'll get you is passive outgoing feeds using slurp; if anyone does that there's a cute secret - turn off dbzincore for nnrpd. That change alone cuts your load average a bunch... (and encourage them to go over to psl, which is much easier on the server, and easier for them to control too.) (note that regular news readers never trigger dbzincore anyhow since they don't do msg-id requests). Another hint - use INN with the streaming patches, at least if your bulk provider has them. You can run a full feed on a 56k but there is little room for fixing hangups (the news flood after a crash of either your server or another big one anywhere on the backbone can be awesome). -- Pete