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Re: Hardware for Internet providers
On Tue, 20 Feb 1996, El-Hanany Yuval wrote:
> 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).
Agreed, especially as far as swapping is concerned. That is the primary
reason I advocate the use of a separate swap DISK (not partition).
Nevertheless, swapping is still very bad in Linux. With enough memory,
however, (64MB, IMHO, is enough for a small ISP), things can be done.
This requires as much duties as possible to be offloaded to other
machines - i.e. named, gated, sendmail, etc, to be OFF the primary ISP
machine. Network performance in Linux _is_ improving, but the old network
cards are still very slow. For best results, PCI is a must.
As for "real" workstations, true, they have advantages. They also have a
mojor disadvantage - price. The minimal SGI workstation (Indi 4600PC)
costs US$6-8000, if not more. I am not aware of Sun prices.
> 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).
True. Keep as much as possible OFF the ISA bus. In fact, a good
motherboard with 4 PCI slots should have:
One - SCSI
Two - NIC (network interface card)
Three - 8/16 port serial card
Four - Either a SCSI card or a 8/16 port serial card,
depending on needs.
If the forth slot is indeed a SCSI card, the news disks should be connected
to it and not to the primary SCSI. Of course, the SCSI cards should be good
(i.e. AHA2940 or BT94x).
---MAV (finger for PGP signature block)
Marc A. Volovic (marc@leonardo.ls.huji.ac.il)
Linguists do it cunningly