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Date:      Sat, 3 Jun 1995 13:42:59 +0200 (MET DST)
From:      J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de>
To:        asami@CS.Berkeley.EDU (Satoshi Asami | =?ISO-2022-JP?B?GyRCQHUbKEI=?= =?ISO-2022-JP?B?GyRCOCsbKEIgGyRCOC0bKEI=?=)
Cc:        hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Large installations of FreeBSD?
Message-ID:  <199506031142.NAA17669@uriah.heep.sax.de>
In-Reply-To: <199505121217.FAA07593@silvia.HIP.Berkeley.EDU> from "Satoshi Asami | =?ISO-2022-JP?B?GyRCQHUbKEI=?= =?ISO-2022-JP?B?GyRCOCsbKEIgGyRCOC0bKEI=?=" at May 12, 95 05:17:57 am

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As Satoshi Asami | =?ISO-2022-JP?B?GyRCQHUbKEI=?= =?ISO-2022-JP?B?GyRCOCsbKEIgGyRCOC0bKEI=?= wrote:
> 
> Hello FreeBSD hackers.  I'm the one that asked about "case for
> FreeBSD" help a while ago...well I'm still fighting for my life
> against a large number of WS and Linux proponents.
> 
> Anyway, I have a question for you.  Are any of you using FreeBSD in a
> large community?  By large, I mean:
> 
> (1) The machine is "large", i.e., lots of memory/disk, large number of 
>     users/ftp/http connections (e.g., wcarchive, Brian Tao's www site)

There are two FreeBSD machines around me that might fall into your
classification.


The first is sax.sax.de, the access point for my local (non-profit)
ISP.  This is a not a too big machine (486/40, 16 MB RAM, 2 x 500 MB
disks, currently 4 modems and additional telnet access via a term
server from the local university), but it's serving around 50 users.
It handles all mail traffic for them (including my huge amount of
-hackers and CTM mail), and operates as a relay to the news backbone
of the local university.  It's still running 1.1.5.1.  More modems
and multiport card are planned.

The most annoying problems are sometimes hanging terminal lines
(generic BSD problem, old Illtrices are told to have been suffered
much more from it: a modem line breaks down, and the process jams with
the "E" flag [trying to exit] on the "ttyout" wait channel), and the
problem recently mentioned in Usenet where several programs do not
properly exit after a modem line breakdown, and loop forever until
killed.  (Lynx being the most offending program here.)


The second one is the main server for our company.  It's mainly
serving 3 GB files via NFS (on 3 disks), but also has to take the load
for a small amount of News and Mail, as well as being the local DNS
server, a tftp server for X-Terminals, a font server for several
X-Servers, and every other task of this kind that comes to mind.  It's
also often used for development purposes (including larger C++
compilations in the past), even though we are not selling FreeBSD
programs.

The machine is an i586/90, 64 MB RAM, PCI-bus, NCR 52C810, WD8013
ethernet (the DEC cards haven't been available yet at the time the box
has been purchased).  It's also still running 1.1.5.1, but with a
modified kernel that devotes ~ 36 MB of the RAM for the file system
buffer cache, since the main purpose is to act as an NFS server.

This machine has been replacing an overloaded old Data General
workstation, much to the satisfaction of my collegues, btw.  It's
sometimes also suffering from a hanging modem port (symptoms as
above), and i've crashed it twice by doing some odd tape operation,
which consequently spammed the SCSI bus (it's running a rather early
version of the PCI/NCR code).  Other than this, it's not even
experiencing the ``object collapse'' problem, and it has already seen
uptimes as large as three months (much in contrast to the SGI Indy's
that are sitting next to it :-).

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)



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