Date: Thu, 23 May 1996 15:31:13 -0500 (CDT) From: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com> To: cjl@qnet.com (Chris Linstruth) Cc: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD: SCSI hangs, panics and other failures as nntp server Message-ID: <199605232031.PAA25173@brasil.moneng.mei.com> In-Reply-To: <m0uMakP-0003ioC@cello.QNET.COM> from "Chris Linstruth" at May 23, 96 06:48:00 am
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> Dear FreeBSD-Hardware (and ISP): > > We at qnet have been attempting to use FreeBSD as a > Usenet News server for about a year. We are at this time > evaluating other alternatives because we have been unable to > achieve the stability required under this kind of load. You won't find a better alternative. I've been very successful using FreeBSD as a news server, as a matter of fact I am setting up a dedicated feeder system consisting of 15 of the new UltraSCSI 1G Hawk (31055N) drives, several NCR810's and an ASUS P133 board. Usually where I see SCSI problems - and this isn't just FreeBSD - is when you mix and match drive types and (worse) vendors on the same SCSI channel. This doesn't help reliability. Stick to one vendor, preferably one drive model. If you must mix and match, put in another SCSI channel and keep the drives on each channel homogeneous if possible. Also, make sure you are using quality components. If you are not using a Triton based board, preferably one known to work well, go out and get one of the new ASUS Triton-II boards, they're under $250. If you ARE using a Triton-I based board, make sure you have thoroughly tested the RAM. Get enough RAM to be a news server. 32MB is about enough to take a pee in. news.sol.net is tight in 64MB RAM; I maintain a million articles and my history.pag file is about 20MB. I usually have less than half a dozen readers on, but the system is adequate. You are maintaining huge data structures in your VM system. Act like you are, and buy the physical memory to support it. The feeder box (NO readers!) I am building will have 128MB RAM. Get multiple SCSI channels. The Adaptec stuff is good, reliable, and has a nice GUI for setup and hardware maintenance. The NCR-810's are dirt cheap, but offer the same performance and reliability as the Adaptec stuff. The differences I see are that you don't get a GUI and you do get it MUCH cheaper. The box I'm building has 3 NCR's. As soon as an AHA-3940 frees up I will have 2 NCR's and a 3940 for _4_ SCSI channels. Get more disks. My smallest news server has 8 disks and it is woefully I/O bound. The feeder box I am building has 17 drives (15 1G, 2 4G). Use good fast disks. I don't like anything over 9ms (Seagate Hawk class), and prefer Barracuda. Remember two 9ms 1G drives will on average be faster than a single 8ms 2G drive. You can use ccd to combine smaller disks into a few larger disks. The reason I usually see for news server failures under FreeBSD is that INN imposes wild requirements on an OS. If you fail to equip your machine adequately, you end up exercising lots of portions of the system that you don't want to be exercising. Some of these portions may have bugs too ;-) I used to see lots of bizarre things happening during expire, because with 48MB RAM I did not have enough RAM to deal with my required VM profile. RAM in particular is real important, and at current prices there is no excuse to have less than 64MB. ... Joe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Greco - Systems Administrator jgreco@ns.sol.net Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI 414/546-7968
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