Date: Sat, 14 Oct 1995 14:30:02 -0700 From: "Russell L. Carter" <rcarter@geli.com> To: codona@planet.net, freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Starting an ISP! Message-ID: <199510142130.OAA16633@geli.clusternet>
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|From: "Johanan L. Codona" <codona@planet.net> |To: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.org |Subject: Starting an ISP! |Sender: owner-isp@FreeBSD.org |Questions: | |* Is FreeBSD a good choice for our OS? (As opposed to BSDI, our second | choice.) My ISP, best.com switched from BSDI to FreeBSD. They have been running it for about five months, on when I checked recently, a P5-90 256K Async box with a single NCR and 4 or possibly 5 drives. They recently moved to an SGI box (can't tell what it is since they've got hinv restricted), and I haven't noticed any improvement in stability and usability, but the SGI is more responsive under the same load. |* What version of FreeBSD should we use? (We are looking to go | "on-the-air" in about 4-6 weeks.) Right now I would install 2.0.5 from the CDROM and then sup -STABLE. | |* We are thinking about a fast Pentium with SCSI disks for storage. Best motherboard is currently the ASUS P55TP4-XE with 512K pipelined burst SRAM. Either 100 or 133 MHz Best drive on the market these days is the Quantum Atlas series, either 2.1G or 4.3G. The Seagate Hawk 4.3 is a very good deal, but a bit slower. | What are the best choices for: | - multi-serial cards There is a driver for the cyclades cards, ftp://ftp.mediacity.com/pub/brian/cyb2.0fb.shar.gz | - memory per user | - networking cards Go PCI, almost any 21040 card will do: DEC, SMC, Infotel, Cogent, Danpex. You can improve NFS performance by going 100BASE-TX between servers and client. DEC, SMC, Infotel cards work fine, in my experience. | - other hardware? | |* What about software? | - Accounting, etc. | - Misc Monitoring | - Backup software | - Security | - User services | |* Do people have any FreeBSD lessons-learned they would like to share? | |Since we can't be fully redundant in terms of hardware, we think that |getting a second disk and frequently mirroring the user and system |disk (along with the usual tape backups) would be a good way to |get our system rapidly back on-line in the event of a disk failure. |Any comments? | |Anyway, let's break the ice and at least talk about FreeBSD as an ISP |platform! | |-- |Johanan L. Codona |The Stekas Group |codona@planet.net | |
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