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From: mandrews@wittenberg.edu (Mike Andrews, Comp Ctr)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Best platform for INN server?
Date: 1 Mar 95 14:08:17 -0500
Organization: Wittenberg University, Springfield OH
Lines: 46
Message-ID: <1995Mar1.140817@wittenberg.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: wittenberg.edu
Disclaimer: I don't want to start yet another religious war. I know it depends
on your particular application... and since I have a particular one in mind,
I need _opinions_ on which to use to add to my own opinions. And I've read
(I hope) all the FAQ's... (there, hope that's enough :-)
I'm going to be setting up a dedicated NNTP server, running INN 1.4sec,
on a VLbus 486/66 with an Adaptec VLB SCSI controller and a 3com 3c509
ISA ethernet card. This machine won't be used for anything else, except
maybe a backup DNS server. Things like X, binary compatibility, etc
aren't important, but speed and stability are.
The little bits that concern me are:
- I've heard mumblings that 3c509 cards are flaky under FreeBSD and
maybe NetBSD too. They're fine on Linux as far as I can tell.
- I don't know how good support for the Adaptec VLB SCSI controller
(2840?) is. Should we get a different SCSI controller?
- Linux does more aggressive disk caching, especially on writes.
- Linux can swap to a file instead of just a partition.
- FreeBSD 2.0 dosen't seem as stable as 1.1.5.1 did, at least on a machine
with only 4 meg of RAM being used solely as a PPP router.
- I've not used NetBSD since 0.9; it was pretty solid then, though.
- BSD's got better networking. When I upgraded Linux from 1.1.47 to 1.1.74,
"netstat" suddenly started showing hundreds of stale long-gone connections
with things like question marks in the "state" column, which bugs me...
- If we only had 16 meg of RAM, which would run better? I hope to have 32,
but I may not be able to control that.
- It's not very practical to spend that many hours installing all three.
- What about buying BSDI? Does it have shared libraries yet? (sorry if I'm
way behind the times there.)
Basically, it boils down to disk and network performance while running one
particular application -- INN.
Right now, I'm basically flipping a coin between FreeBSD-current and NetBSD
though I have INN running as a test on a Linux box now. (I can't tell how
well it works because they only gave me an 8 meg machine to test with. Can
you say "thrashing"?)
Please reply in email to save bandwidth and to help prevent potential
religious wars. :) Thanks...
Mike Andrews
Wittenberg University
--
-- Mike Andrews -=- mandrews@wittenberg.edu -=- root@fragile.termfrost.org --