[Prev][Next][Index]
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.
.*. "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not
-() < circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a
`*' straight line." ,------------------------------------------------
-- B. Mandelbrot / Ira Abramov , SysAdmin at the Gilo HighSchool
------------------' ira@gilo.jlm.k12.il, http://www.gilo.jlm.k12.il/~ira
snailmail at POBox 3600, Jerusalem 91035, Israel, BBS/FAX (+972)-2-430-471
Text Pager 48484, at (+972) 3-610-6666, 2-294-666 and 4-30-6666