Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 03:34:12 -0400 (EDT) From: "James D. Stewart" <jds@c4systm.com> To: questions@FreeBSD.org Subject: FreeBSD INN News Server. Message-ID: <Pine.SCO.3.91.960812030524.15194A-100000@goethe.c4systm.COM>
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The plea... We are in process of converting our Usenet News server to FreeBSD. In the past it has been SCO Unix 3.2.4 (lots of problems), and Redhat Linux 1.2.13 and 2.0.10 (even more problems). When our satellite feed jumped from 200+ Mb/day to 800+ Mb/day, we had to do something. We already have a box with FreeBSD 2.0.5 that has been up constantly for almost a year with no problems: the only time it has ever had to be rebooted was during a 5 hour power outage last winter. Other than that, it has been like a rock! No problems what-so-ever. The News server is running with a AMD586/133 chip (Triton chipset), has an Adaptec 2940 (their SCSISelect program says aha2940U), and 5 hard disks with the following layout: 1.2 Gb Seagate for /, /var, and /tmp 1.2 Gb Seagate for /usr, /u, and swap 2.6 Gb DEC for /var/spool/news (all but alt.*) 3.9 Gb Fujitsu for /var/spool/news/alt (alt.*) 540 Mb Connor for /var/spool/news/over.view (overview database) When we installed FreeBSD 2.1, we could not get the system to boot - the book we have said that is probably due to bad disk geometry. All disks came from existing systems and were operational. We tried using the manufacturers specs for cyls/hds/sects to no avail. We tried installing MS-DOS on all drives to no avail. We used the numbers on the existing FreeBSD system to no avail (it has the same model Seagates). The only way we got it to boot was to create 1 partition in fdisk and respond No to the "incompatible with future filesystems" prompt. When we started the News system, the processing was so slow we could not keep up with the feed. There are 150 K of articles/day and the best we could do was 1.4 articles/second. With the Linux setup, we get 3.54 articles/second, and SCO did 4.22 (different box for SCO). The problems with SCO and Linux are they need to be rebooted 4 - 6 times a day because of system hang-ups - mostly general protection faults or bad inodes. With the FreeBSD setup, the system would just hang - no message and no response to any key combo. We know we have this setup wrong somewhere. After all, the other FreeBSD system here is working wonderfully. We just don't know where. Have you any hints, ideas, suggestions? Can you point us in the right direction? Another problem is that we have 5 disks, and the setup procedure only installs 4. Is there a way to change that? We could not find a procedure for adding disk drives after-the-fact in the Install book. Is there a procedure for that if that is the way to go? Any help you can give will be greatly appreciated. The system has been out of service for 6 days now, and the users are getting really grumpy. Thanks a lot! Jim Stewart C4 Systems, Inc.
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