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Message-ID: <950803085819.AA29439@dojo>
Date: Thu, 3 Aug 1995 08:58:19 GMT
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!simtel!dojo!not-for-PROFS
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.advocacy
From: Mike O'Connor <mjo@dojo.mi.org>
Subject: Re: Sun/Solaris or Pentium/Linux for new server ?
References: <3vlpgk$rdk@graphite.comco.com> <3vpg3g$q35@shell2.best.com>
Reply-To: Mike O'Connor <mjo@dojo.mi.org>
Organization: :noitazinagrO
Distribution: inet
Lines: 58
In article <3vpg3g$q35@shell2.best.com>,
Russell Carter <rcarter@best.com> wrote:
:>... I'm far more interested in success/horror stories of other people
:>who have run busy news servers under Solaris, Linux and Free/NetBSD
:>(especially if they've done two or all three of these options.)
:
:My ISP runs FreeBSD, they claim a lot of things about being in
:the top 5 in this or that, blah blah blah, there has been bugs,
:but for the last month or so, 4000 users on 1 (ok 2) pentiums
:appears to be working fine. http://www.best.com
I run what appears to be the top Linux news server in Brian Reid's Top
1000 these days (#26, simtel) -- I suppose this qualifies me as "busy".
It's a Zeos P90 with a separate disk controller and disk for spool which
has run various Linux 1.2-1.3 minimalistic kernels and INN 1.4UNOFF1.
Here are some definite 'cons' to running a Linux news server:
1. It doesn't like dozens of inbound NNTP connections. You don't want
to be down for too long or you end up with the stdin nntplink crowd
shoving you their second link and bam, your box feels damn unhappy.
I had to play games with rejecting feeds just to be able to catch up
after my first unhappy venture with a new kernel. I have to be very
careful about who I exchange feeds with, tracking just how I get fed.
2. I love the Linux bug where it wants to allocate swap space and never
free it up when it has enough memory such that it should damn near
never be swapping, particularly during an expire. I 'blink' my
server on and off to free up some swap space every day, but watch
the number slowly crawl up even when "free" shows 18MB available
and there are virtually no "idle" processes. Fortunately, owing to
the kernel-of-the-month club, I reboot often enough, but I doubt I
could leave the box up for a month running news.
3. As far as running INN for TCP/IP feeds and reading goes, the lack of
working mmap() and working domain sockets is a drag. I've been told
by a few sources I trust that DBZCFLAGS=-DMMAP should be happy. I
have had nothing but grief with that configuration; your mileage may
vary. Some kernels appear to be less happy with HAVE_UNIX_DOMAIN=DO
than others; it's safer to not be configured that way. You have to
take some pretty pessimistic assumptions to be stable with Linux.
I've run or helped fix/run news servers on SunOS machines, Ultrix, DEC
OSF/1, HP-UX, and various revs of BSDI boxes as well as Linux. If someone
came up to me with a PC and asked me what to do for Usenet, I'd sooner
point them to FreeBSD than Linux, if FreeBSD is basically like BSDI but
with better/modern hardware support. One _can_ get a Linux box to work,
but if you want something more than a leaf feed and you keep up with the
Linux development cycles, you'll have less grief with another OS for now.
...Mike
--
Michael J. O'Connor Internet: mjo@dojo.mi.org
InterNIC WHOIS: MJO http://www.coast.net/~mjo
"Everybody knows... the dice are loaded." -Leonard Cohen