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Date:      Sat, 24 Feb 1996 20:35:23 -0600 (CST)
From:      Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
To:        matt@pip.net (Matt Emerson)
Cc:        freebsd-isp@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: switch from sun to freebsd news server?
Message-ID:  <199602250235.UAA14521@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
In-Reply-To: <199602250142.UAA00358@nightfly.pip.net> from "Matt Emerson" at Feb 24, 96 08:42:29 pm

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> i may be completely mad, but i have been thinking about replacing
> our current news server (sparc 10/40 running sunos 4.1.4, 64MB mem,
> 8GB spool) with a pentium running freebsd.
> 
> ideally, we'd like to use an ibm pc server 320 with a raid, and
> 64MB.  but after poking around the mailing list archives, i'm
> not too hopeful this will be a viable option.  (i stick my
> tongue out at adaptec for not releasing docs on the 3985, which
> is just what i need.)
> 
> i guess i could move the news server to solaris 2.5 and use
> online disksuite to do "software raid," but i'm too used to bsd
> systems and would probably become very sick and puke all over my
> keyboard if i was forced to deal with solaris for any extended
> time period.
> 
> so, should i shut up and be happy with the ss10?  or would a
> switch be reasonable?

You're not completely mad.  I prefer FreeBSD for news - I manage several
large servers under both Solaris and FreeBSD, and I definitely feel that the
FreeBSD boxes are better performers.

Depending on what your usage of the machine is, I would recommend various
configurations.  I'm not quite clear on what the importance of a RAID
subsystem would be, but FreeBSD does support disk concatenation and striping
in software which gives you many of the same performance benefits.

In my opinion a P100 or P133 will absolutely outperform a SS10/40
(particularly the non-cached /40's).  The AHA-3940 is a really sweet
controller and I recall someone saying it would not be hard to support the
AHA-3985 if support for the RAID features was _not_ an issue.  Seeing as how
that is a sweet looking controller...  :-)

I just wish I could convince the folks who own the Solaris news server I
manage to switch to Intel and FreeBSD  :-(

... Joe

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joe Greco - Systems Administrator			      jgreco@ns.sol.net
Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI			   414/546-7968



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