Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 22:27:59 -0600 (MDT) From: Lou GLASSY <glassy@caesar.cs.montana.edu> To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Subject: questions about freebsd as an nfs/smb fileserver Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.05.9910132127150.14345-100000@caesar.cs.montana.edu>
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dear all, hello-
Disclaimers: [a] I've been doing sysadmin work in one form or another
for about 6 years, under Ultrix, Solaris, NetBSD, Linux, SGI Irix,
OSF1/DUX, HPUX, AIX, ... [b] I'm reasonably familiar with SMP systems
from a user-perspective (having three to feed, daily) and with the
theoretical aspects of mulitprocessing, since among other things
I'm working on my CS PhD in parallel computing. [c] I'm asking the
following questions in good faith, so please spare me the flames. :-)
My questions are:
[1] What mailing list should I send my "FreeBSD as a fileserver"
questions to? I didn't know, so I thought I'd try this
list first...
?
I am a college unix systems administrator. In the near future,
one of the departments for whom I work is planning to get new
fileserver(s) to replace our current AlphaServer 2100 5/300 running DUX.
The kind of system I'm recommending will be one or more
i386-type systems with lots of memory and disk, and possibly
multi-cpu if that's wise.
Because I am familiar with *BSD-type operating systems from an
admin point of view, and because my experience to date with
the reliability of at least one BSD-derivative (NetBSD),
I am advocating we go with a *BSD-based solution for our
fileserving needs. A number of friends at ISPs have used
both NetBSD and FreeBSD under combat conditions, and have
reported very favorably on how these systems perform under load,
so I am comfortable recommending either.
[2] Is anyone running FreeBSD as a departmental fileserver in a
university environment? The kind of load I'm looking at is
pretty modest -- let's say 50 unix systems as nfs clients,
and up to 100 windows systems as smb clients, concurrently.
The kinds of things users do during peak load times are
writing code via the familiar edit-compile-bomb-cycle.
I know about the ftp.cdrom.com setup, and am wondering
if FreeBSD does fileserving as well as it does ftp serving... :-)
[3] If you do use FreeBSD as a fileserver, is having a second
CPU advantageous? If a second CPU is really a win,
then I can push for the new server box to be a dual cpu unit.
[4] My understanding at the moment is that FreeBSD uses a Big Lock
to ensure only one kernel thread/CPU combination is active at
at a time. Is this correct? (If it is, then it doesn't seem
like multiple CPUs really will be that big of a win; if this
isn't correct, then I have News for the person who told me
this... :-)
Why [3] and [4] are of interest, is that right now, the
SMP question is the one visible difference I see that could
make FreeBSD a better fit than my other alternative (NetBSD),
which does not have SMP support at this time. The primary
advantages of NetBSD for me, are simply that I've used it
for a while, and that I can run NetBSD comfortably on all
my current unix client systems (say, 30 AXP + 30 i386 boxes)
With FreeBSD as a server, I still have to run DUX or something
else (NetBSD) on my AXP clients. With NetBSD
as a server, I can run the same OS on the clients + server(s),
which makes the admin tasks a little more straightforward.
Thanks kindly in advance for any information / perspectives
you can give me-
lou.
--
Api the Baboon: You're just getting old and decrepit! No one will be
able to stop the tidal wave of Java!
Monkey 347: Is that so.
Api: Absolutely!
347: Ah. So 10 million lemmings can't be wrong...?
-- from "The Adventures of Code Monkey #347"
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