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Re: Hardware for Internet providers



On Mon, 19 Feb 1996, Marc A. Volovic wrote:

> > 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 
> 
> 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.
I know what I said.

a Pentium 133, 64 megs of ram, can hold EASYLY a few 'Stalions' cards and 
hold 48 modems locally, running PPP connections on them, serve mail, 
news, http and proxy-cache easy. actually, with 128 meg and enough slots, 
it can hold 128 modems too.

testing at an ISP's site, we showed that a modem connected to a terminal 
server on the LAN get's better PPP through a clean 8 bit connection to a 
linux than locally from the TS. most TSs actually fall apart when you try 
to open more than 3 115200 PPP connections anyway.

> 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).
I'd go to a total of about 6 gigs, cleverly connected in a RAID (Linux 
supports internally), both for speed and system security. you can get good 
fast IWILL Pentium boards these days with Ultrawide SCSI-3 on board (upto 
80 megabyte/sec rates over the SCSI bus) for pretty cheap.




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