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Re: Hardware for Internet providers



This thread seems to advocate the use of PC's instead of real work stations.
I must say that my experience, although quite pleasant with linux, seems to
disagree with this approach. At my work place, we had a PC pentium 32MB
running Solaris. On the paper, it should have been our strongest machine at
the time. However, it was OK as long as you stayed within the memory limits,
once you exceeded and started swapping, it was a lost cause. It served as an
X Terminal until we got our orders of Sun Workstations.

At home I've got a 486 16MB SCSI linux, and while it's great, swapping is
far from enjoyable and is not comparable to any of the WorkStations brands
I've worked with (RS/6000, Digital, Sun, SiliconGraphics).

As far as I know of the internals of your average PC that shouldn't be
surprising since it still suffers from the drawbacks of the original PC
(although that may have changed already in the Pentium machines).

Perhaps an Internet provider doesn't need a true UNIX work station, but I
believe that for most applications there's a great architecture difference
which would be hard bridge.

                Yuval El-Hanany
                yuvalle@math.tau.ac.il
                yuval@checkpoint.com