Date: Sun, 13 Apr 1997 02:41:59 -0500 From: "Jeffrey J. Mountin" <sysop@mixcom.com> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: spork <spork@super-g.com>, Vincent Poy <vince@mail.MCESTATE.COM>, isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: TS Holy War (was Re: Some advice needed.) Message-ID: <3.0.32.19970413024159.00ce7f84@mixcom.com>
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At 03:12 PM 4/12/97 -0700, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: --snip-- >I know of one ISP who had 3 machines doing the work of one (everything >split out, as you say, but with only 200 customers) and it only increased >the maintainance headache to *no* gain whatsoever. 3 machines to secure, >3 machines to maintain, it was evil. I stuck all the services back >on ONE machine again and made a 2nd one a redundant spare for the 1st, >with all of its important files rsync'd over nightly. The 3rd machine >then came free to go to someone's house or something. :-) When I first started with MIX, it had been a "side job" for over 5 years and had about 500 customers, about 40 web sites, and a news server with a full feed. We called them the 3 stooges (different cases, etc), but there were well built and thought out. On a 486DX-40 32Mb we ran mail, RADIUS, DNS, Annex (for Xylogics), and users could telnet, ftp, etc. and when we upgraded (around 1000 customers at the time) to a P133 the change was drastic. My point is most customers might be impressed by PPro and Alphas, but how the system is set up counts. It is still doing all that with ~3000 customers and I added a drive to spread the IO. Plans are to move mail and RADIUS off it, but this is more for security reasons. Customers will have it as a play ground and I only seriously have to deal with security on just one server. >Now they have one machine which still spends most of its time >twiddling its thumbs and a redundant backup which they never had >before. If I'd been able to advise these folks in the beginning, I >could have saved them money spend needlessly (for now) on the 3rd. > >Someday, if this ISP breaks the 500 customer barrier or so, I may >start breaking things down again, though it will probably be just as >easy to simply bump the primary machine's configuration up a notch, >say to a Pentium Pro system or something. The secondary can remain as >it is since it's only intended to be in service during short periods >of outtage anyway. I'd bet adding a few drives would work. Just that now it is getting harder to find smaller drives. Wishing for more RAID support (I am aware that the DPT has support), then I'd go RAID 5 on some, which means I don't have to worry (as much) about problems. >Sometimes it's just as easy to get yourself in a tangle from >over-engineering the solution as well as under-engineering it (and >over-engineering costs a lot more :-). In the extreme one place had the servers to handle 10s of 1000s and in one year only accumulated 2000 or so users. And now I hear a system with a new owner is talking about having 500 dial-in lines (X2 at that) and so on.... must be nice to have money to burn. Hell I'll move in, take over, tell them to use this and *plan* things. Start smaller, but be prepared. And of course they could then pay me more from the start. The thing is to know what you can do with X amount of machine. On that note consider the number of times just recently that someone has well over 100 virtual hosts on a Pentium class, but of course hits aren't mentioned, still. Only recently have we caught up with what I need, which means I still have room to grow and plans continue. Now if I could just get a monthly budget. 8-) .... Can I keep what I don't use? 8-O ------------------------------------------- Jeff Mountin - System/Network Administrator jeff@mixcom.net MIX Communications Serving the Internet since 1990
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