Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 12:57:11 +0300 From: "ANdrei" <lists@hausro.de> To: <freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: building an old-hardware server Message-ID: <04fa01c6c052$6a9f3db0$857ba8c0@Rage> References: <200607201318.k6KDIOKH092991@lurza.secnetix.de><049d01c6c005$dfee6570$857ba8c0@Rage> <200608142217.16569.ogautherot@vtr.net>
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hi Olivier, and thanks for the reply, > In general, old hardware can be used without too many problems, except for > the > hard drives: if you still want to do it, select items with little mileage. some 2.1GB IBM's are still new, but I don't expect problems for the other SCSI drives either, have been using parts from the same stock pile for years and everything went ok, so this will not be an issue I guess. > In general, SCSI is faster so it should be a better option (although I > have no > first hand experience) but for a small server, IDE should still be > sufficient. The size of the disk may be your criterion at the end of the > day. > 4 to 6 disks means space, power consumption and possibly heat. Make sure > you > don't get to a situation where you need extra ventilation just for the > disks > - I suppose the chassis too will be second hand... You might have a higher > failure rate just because of this. yeah, you are right. I'd still like to use a few separate disks, as individual disks mean higher speed usually, especially when compiling on such slow processors. Ventilation will not be a problem, the chassis is second hand but almost new, and is big and has great ventilation. Is a 10MB/s SCSI-2 usually really faster than an UDMA33 IDE? Seems like it, when looking at seek times, etc... I might go for the SCSI solution, all disks are just lying around here... I think 2x2GB SCSI to be a better solution than 1x4GB IDE, as when I mount different parts of the FS on different drives I will getter better access times. As I mentioned: space will not be such a big problem, rather disk speed and processor usage... > For 10 to 20 users, I don't know if RAID will make a significant > difference > (I would not think so). If you still want to go this way, RAID1 would be > an > easy route and ensure a simple backup mechanism in case of failure. I was thinking about that also, or striping+mirroring... But would software RAID not be slower than non-RAID and kill my slow processors? Can anyone recommend any software RAID solution for this, that I can use from the beginning of the install of 6.1? > One 600MHz processor may be faster, depending on the CPU load balance - > multiple processors means some overhead in management and does not ensure > full balance. Also, if you upgrade, you will have to replace 2 processors > instead of one, what might not be an economical advantage - procurement > may > also be complex for such old parts. Actually when I will upgrade I can go up to 1GHz with one or two processors (have a termination adapter at hand already, in case I use only one), but now there is no money for this... All I have around here is one 600MHz PIII, one 450MHz PIII and two 350MHz PII processors... I will try to give it a run with both the 2x350's and the 600MHz CPU when everything is installed and done... I will have to have 2 different kernels already compiled for this, right? > If you plan on using a database in SMP, you may reach your limit quickly. > I > would recommend a dry run on another machine with the same services and > measure the RAM usage. Note that FreeBSD does a good job at caching disk > accesses - what requires free RAM. OK, will try to put some more in :) Of course, as always, more RAM is better and never enough :) > I've been using the RTL8139B, Rhine-II and Rhine-III (on a C3-based Epia > board) without any problem for quite some time now. I can recommend them. > The > fact that the drivers are buggy does not necessarily mean that you will > face > big issues: in most cases, the bugs just apply to some particular > features. RTL8139 worked fine for me usually, too, but sometimes it got very slow... No experience with Rhine on FreeBSD though, but I read that some buffer/registry access tweaks that had to be done impact CPU usage quite alot sometimes... As I have the 3Com anyway around, I decided to go for it... ANdrei
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