Date: Mon, 20 Mar 1995 16:16:03 -0500 (EST) From: James Robinson <james@hermes.cybernetics.net> To: questions@FreeBSD.org (FreeBSD questions) Subject: Yet another ISP question Message-ID: <199503202116.QAA04380@hermes.cybernetics.net>
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With all of the talk of ISP's using Our Favorite OS for various numbers of users + various hardware configurations, I've been thinking of trying my own hand at such a task, and am asking your net.opinion on the following configuration and goals: 1)Scaleable -- minimul hardware costs for initial number of simul users. 16 to start out with. 2)Each piece of hardware should be re-used with new configurations. No throwing out a box already paid for. 3)Regular service provision -- shell accounts, SLIP, PPP. Possible news-server. WWW server a must (but that's easy). So, here's the hardware to start out with: DX2/66 EISA w/32M RAM adaptec 1742 or buslogic equiv boca 16 port I/O card attached to 16 14.4 modem lines couple gig of disk space spread across three disks, giving a few hundred M of swap. Cheapo vid card + monitor -- I've already got a good X station. 16bit ethernet card for LAN out to bridge, be it ISDN or frame relay fractional T1. In this configuration, everything is done on this box. Would it be interrupted to death by the Boca board? I would suspect that it would, either then or if another was added. So, when the user base grew out enough to warrant more simul users, move to two machines: One machine acting as terminal server, with multiple I/O cards. Hack on login / rlogin so that PPP / SLIP sessions are handled locally, while shell users, when successfully validated, get transparently forwarded to the compute server with the lowest load -- simple if only one compute server is online. Makes adding more CPU power to the configuration not too hard. Now, YP would help out keeping a single threaded user database big time. Any reasons why our new YP server functionality won't do the trick in this case? When it comes to having multiple compute CPU's, and the clients are delivered one or another due to load balancing, being able to have that user see their files transparently would be a big plus. Unfortunately, NFS seems scary to be put in such an environment due to security reasons. Excluding IP spoofing, could NFS be set up in such a manner to be fairly confident in not allowing rouge mounts? Would a FreeBSD box as terminal server make sense, or would you just put up the extra cash for an Annex? Gaping holes in plan? Possible use would be to link up Western North Carolina into something like what Blacksburg, VA has -- a virtual community. Either that or what nando.net has created (check out http://www.nando.net/ if you've not been there already). Thanks for any insight, James James Robinson <URL http://hermes.cybernetics.net/>; wholly endorses: FreeBSD | Zappa | Tull | Albermarle Ale | XFree86 | Seagull acoustic guitars | <URL http://www.freebsd.org/>; Quotes du Jour: "Once upon a time, it was in Albequerqe New Mexico..."
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