Date: Wed, 7 Jan 1998 17:25:29 -0600 (CST) From: Jacob Suter <jsuter@uranus.intrastar.net> To: Lukas Wunner <lukas@design.de> Cc: =?iso-8859-1?Q?=22Luis_E=2E_Mu=F1oz=22?= <lem@cantv.net>, freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: [fbsd-isp] Designing for a very large ISP Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980107163341.16930B-100000@uranus.intrastar.net> In-Reply-To: <19980104141146.32430@reactor>
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> My suggestion would be to look at an SGI Origin 200/2000 or Sun U2 box > instead of a PC box running FreeBSD. We have experienced severe problems > with PCs wrt expandability/scalability. E.g., we currently have 256MB of > RAM in our news box but would love to go to 512MB, but the motherboard > is not capable of doing that although the documentation and the webpages > state the contrary (it's a Tyan Tomcat III or IV). If you want to go to > something like 1GB or 2GB of RAM, you're stuck with a PC. The only I've seen 1GB ram in an Alpha Server (Dual processor), running *cough cough* OpenVMS 7.2. > solution seem to be PPro based machines, but the chipsets available so > far are really ugly wrt memory and PCI performance in my opinion (as > compared to good old Pentium based boards). The only chipset which seems > to be able to support lots of RAM and more than 4 PCI cards seems to be > the Orion GX, one implementation being the AMI Goliath board (cf. www.ami.com). > However, I have not been able so far to get my hands on one of these > boards *without* buying a large expensive box from Compaq et al (it seems > AMI only sells these boards to OEMs, at least I have not found a > distributor here in Germany, if you know of one, please drop me a line). > The Goliath board also requires special (read: expensive) DIMMs, you > can not use standard PS/2s or SDRAMs. Interesting. I've seen VIA VP2 boards that will do 512mb on the board, apparently assuming you put in two 128MB dimm/sdram and four 64mb SIMM sticks... Not a terribly fast but a situation that should work... > Experience also has shown that usually you have to invest more time > into getting a PC based server running as compared to a machine which > was designed from scratch to be a high performance/bandwidth server > like the SGI Origin 2000, and time is money (I have spent *several* hours > trying to get the Tomcat board running with more than 256MB of RAM). SGI Origin 2000... Irix... Server? Not really. > Note: this is no FreeBSD-bashing. I'd always prefer a FreeBSD-based > machine to an SGI Origin 2000 if it wasn't that difficult to find > PC hardware which suits our needs wrt scalability/performance. > Any recommendations for high-end PC hardware are welcome. wcarchive seems to run fine on their single P6/233 - 512MB system... I am pretty sure its not packed with special components JKH made with a soldering iron :) JS
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