Date: Sun, 4 Jan 1998 11:45:02 -0700 (MST) From: Atipa <freebsd@atipa.com> To: "Stephen D. Spencer" <lists@artorius.sunflower.com> Cc: Lukas Wunner <lukas@design.de>, lem <lem@cantv.net>, freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: [fbsd-isp] Designing for a very large ISP Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.91.980104113307.542B-100000@dot.ishiboo.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980104093814.11451C-100000@artorius.sunflower.com>
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> > My suggestion would be to look at an SGI Origin 200/2000 or Sun U2 box > > instead of a PC box running FreeBSD. > > Hrm... > > I will put in an anti-plug for SGI machines as internet servers: for base > price + cost of "approved SGI hardware" + price of the C compiler (so one > can compile updated ip servers such as INND, BIND, Sendmail, popper, > etc...) + time required to vodoo the said software into compiling on Irix > 6.x, we could have purchased a seperate PC to receive news for each of the > major seven usenet trees. I've had aweful 3rd party vendor support for > extra equipment (had a 4 gig external die on our Indy running INND and > found out that it costs $400 (non refundable) for Falcon (an approved SGI > 3rd party drive vendor) to drop ship a new drive. "Approved" 3rd party > (kingston) 32 meg SIMMs cost around $280 a piece) I have had similar luck with Sun. I am still sticking to my guns with the PCs. I also agree that you will have more physical boxes lying around, but it will be much easier to support them inexpensively. Steer clear of proprietarty systems unless you have some real money to burn. If you put multiple net cards in each machine and include static routes between your most used hosts, you can keep your net load manageable. If you use DNS pools, you can have www.yourdomain.com actually be spread out over 8 or so machines. Same with shell accounts. Have each user's local space NFS exported (over several NFS servers if needed), and mount them on a pool of shell boxes. The tricky thing will be user validation / management. I think you'd need to tie together NIS+ and Radius. Should not be a problem, but I haven't ever had to. The things I would not recommend using a PC for are as a Router (and/or CSU/DSU), or as a terminal server. Get a nice Cisco router and use Livingston terminal servers. For large scales, PC serial-based boards will give you headaches. Kevin
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