Date: Fri, 06 Nov 1998 23:48:03 -0500 From: Malartre <malartre@aei.ca> To: K <hwg@stardreams.dyn.ml.org> Cc: small@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: School Server & PicoBSD Message-ID: <3643D103.30CCF34B@aei.ca> References: <3.0.3.32.19981107113531.037fe7d0@Tasha.STARDreams.org>
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K wrote:
>
> 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."
They are lame and lazy. :-)
Anyway, it's my parent who paid all that stuff with taxes.. And it's
really scrap.
Computer in school is not a good idea, if you don't have competent
teachers and good application (since we use only netscape and
MS-Office..)
I think I will start by asking one simple machine, maybe we need a mail
server, since they only do shitty internet for so-called "research". In
fact I play Java-Chess..! Really, I hate what we do with this $$$
equipments. I want to install rc5-craking on all of the machines! (huh,
90 machines always online and idle!)
Ok, I resume: the Ethernet is NOT a problem since the hub do the job.
The uplink is the "bottleneck".
In the Netscape config, they use a proxie address. So the server is
acting has a proxie server.
I would need squid to speed up things (has a cache server).
Tank you Jeroen and K, I think now the main job is convincing the admin
to let me take one computer for the fun of doing it!
My excuse will be a mail server for the school.
And I know they need a server for web page. Hum, learning apache to..
--
[Malartre][malartre@aei.ca][http://www.aei.ca/~malartre/]
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