Date: Sat, 07 Nov 1998 11:35:31 +1100 From: K <hwg@stardreams.dyn.ml.org> To: Malartre <malartre@aei.ca>, small@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: School Server & PicoBSD Message-ID: <3.0.3.32.19981107113531.037fe7d0@Tasha.STARDreams.org> In-Reply-To: <36433B8E.78D0E8C1@aei.ca>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
At 13:10 11/6/98 -0500, Malartre wrote:
>-Is it a problem with Ethernet (I think they use 10baseT), WinNT or
>both?
Not so much a problem with Ethernet, operating at 10Mbps, more of a problem
with the uplink, as in the school's link to their ISP. Ethernet's pretty
darn fast, even at 10, capable of pushing around 1.2MBytes/sec. Sounds like
your school hasn't spent enough money on their uplink :) (My guess is that
it could be ISDN, either single (64K) or dual (128B) channel.. or *gasp*
god forbid, MODEM!)
>-Would PicoBSD change that? (talking about speed)
Not really. The congestion problem would still remain. While I'm not really
all that hot for NT as a network OS ("NT Server" is an oxymoron, or a joke
in bad taste), don't be so quick to blame it :P
>Because I would like to bring PicoBSD, simply enter it and reboot.
>The only job I want him to do is to act has a server(gateway?) to access
>internet.
>The main problem are:
>-I don't currently know the hardware of the server. But it's not
>bullshit I think. Certainly a P200 and +
>-I never worked with Ethernet, I don't know the architecture of the
>school system.
My recommendation is that you study their network in greater detail, it's
interesting, there's a lot to know about it, and it's fun too (that's what
got me started). Knowing how all elements of the network behave is the
first step to pinpointing and resolving the problem. To implement a
solution like this properly, first find out what is their uplink, how it
communicates with the server (serial? Ethernet port? Multihomed system? etc).
There are a couple of ways to increase speed without upgrading the uplink,
but this would actually require a full-blown FreeBSD system. I use a
FreeBSD box as a comms server for the rest of my boxes at home (NT on
most), and I find that on a modem, a caching DNS nameserver and the squid
HTTP cache greatly accelerate the speed of my web browsing - especially
useful in your case if the students hit the same site repeatedly, in my
experience with fellow college students, hotmail seems to be a prime
candidate for caching :)
Squid stores copies of frequently used pages and especially images (which
are the biggest eaters of bandwidth, I'm not so worried about text data)
locally, and thus are accessible at full 10Mbps speed (or 100 in my case :)
without any traffic being sent across the slow uplink.
Maybe you could try pulling this trick with a Zip disk as a friend
suggested. Make a PicoBSD boot disk, keep it aside, then make a regular
FreeBSD installation disk. Boot the installation disk, with the Zip mounted
as fixed media, newfs the thing into one big 100MB partition, prep it for
boot, but don't install any of the regular FreeBSD distributions, leave it
empty. Then boot the PicoBSD floppy and copy everything in / to the Zip
disk. Have the squid package and pkg_add handy somewhere, so you can throw
them on the Zip disk too and install squid from a package (I'm not
un-tarring the ports collection to a Zip, no way! ;)
Then boot the Zip disk, you've got PicoBSD on a boot disk AND squid (wanna
try packing bind8 too, for the caching DNS? ;)
Any comments on the feasibility of this idea are welcome. I don't have a
Zip drive at the moment or bootable SCSI card to try it out, so if anybody
succeeds in this endeavor, let me know :)
--
K
"Deliver yesterday, code today, think tomorrow."
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-small" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?3.0.3.32.19981107113531.037fe7d0>