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Re: Hardware for Internet providers



On Mon, 19 Feb 1996, Ira Abramov wrote:

> a sun 40 amounts to about a Pentium 90 and costs 5 times if not more. a 
> friend of mine once ran data through 400 PPP processes on a 486DX66 with 
> 16 meg, and all was smooth as hell... (didn't bother the CPU :-) what you 
> want then is a good network card, a stable kernel, and most of the 
> memory will go for caching the http requests, and running apps like 
> harvest engines, and various service daemons. a second computer may be 
> used for backup,  but for under 100 users, or maybe 70, one computer is 
> enough. 

I almost agree. Note that he asked about an ISP, not a web server. Assume
(as is probably correct) that he's providing only PPP/SLIP (i.e. no shell
accounts). Say a 100 users. Say a user uses his account for 30 minutes a
day. That's 3000 minutes a day, or 50 modem hours.

50 modem hours with only one or two lines translates into a busy signal
and loss of business. 4 incoming lines are, therefore, the UTTER minimum.
I'd feel safer with 8 (i.e. 6.25 hours of use per modem per day) on a
cascade line.

At 8 simultaneous connections, I would suggest 32-64 MB of memory. The 
more, the merrier, of course, but 32 is minimum and no X on the machine.

If the machine is going to provide new, use SCSI disks. Note: DISKS. 
PLURAL. Not ONE DISK, but (AT LEAST) THREE disks:

	1. System disk (250-450MB)
	2. Swap disk (small, say 170MB).
	3. NEWS disk (LARGE, say 4GB).

It might be prudent to have two or more news disks, on a good SCSI card. 
Reading linux-kernel and aic7xxx lists, it seems that Buslogics are the
current leaders in driver quality under Linux. Does anyone know who sells
Buslogics in Israel, if at all.

This should be backed up by a computer that is at least 40% of the primary.

This should be backed up by a third computer which is responsible for the
less interesting duties: dns, mail, etc. This can be any simple 386+8MB.

My 0.000000000000001 erg of opinion, courtesy to Sefi Merkin.


---MAV               (finger for PGP signature block)
Marc A. Volovic (marc@leonardo.ls.huji.ac.il)
                 Linguists do it cunningly