Date: Sun, 7 Jan 1996 13:51:16 -0800 (PST) From: Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com> To: Craig Shrimpton <craigs@os.com> Cc: John Anderson <johna@mail.bbcc.ctc.edu>, freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Would like your opinion Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.91.960107133935.9865J-100000@okjunc.junction.net> In-Reply-To: <Pine.3.89.9601051532.A7414-0100000@solar.os.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Fri, 5 Jan 1996, Craig Shrimpton wrote: > You could offer a basic IP service but not news or web with that setup. > News needs its own machine with 32MB(min) 128MB(best) memory and at least 8 > GB for a full feed. You could run web on the other machine if you bumped > the memory to 32MB. We ran everything except news on a 486DX2/66 with 12 megs RAM until recently. Now commercial WWW runs on it's own 486DX/100 with 16 megs and the DX2/66 has 16 megs as well. USENET news runs on a DX2/66 that used to have 16 megs RAM (but if we missed an expire, things got real slow) and now has 32 megs RAM. It has an IDE root drive and three SCSI drives. Swap is on one of the SCSI drives along with history, overviews on another and a 9 gig SCSI drive has the spool. The main point I am making is that CPU is usually not a bottle neck. The second point is that adding RAM may not have a significant effect, especially with only 5 phone lines. The main upgrades I mentioned above happened when we went to 25 incoming lines. > You mentioned 56K line. One thing you might consider is get your IP > delivered by frame relay. You could then purchase a Cisco 2511 > router/terminal server to handle the incoming PPP connections. A Livingston Portmaster 2eR could do the same thing but can handle 56K leased line or frame relay and can also go up to fractional or full T1. But a sync card in the FreeBSD box (http://www.etinc.com) can also handle frame relay or leased lines from 56K to T1. Personally, I am biased in favor of terminal servers for dialup lines but I can see no problems with using a FreeBSD box and sync card for routing packets. > Remember, distributed computing power is the key to a > restfull night's sleep! Excellent advice. You may not be able to allocate functions to separate boxes today, but you definitely should plan to do this as soon as you can. > Word of advice: All disks except for maybe / should be SCSI. Use only > PCI bus master controllers. This is especially important if you have a SCSI > tape drive. The only exception I would make to this is that I like to use a cheaper IDE drive for the root drive since it offloads the SCSI bus. Michael Dillon Voice: +1-604-546-8022 Memra Software Inc. Fax: +1-604-542-4130 http://www.memra.com E-mail: michael@memra.com
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Pine.LNX.3.91.960107133935.9865J-100000>