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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.cs.su.oz.au!metro!metro!news.nsw.CSIRO.AU!mel.dit.csiro.au!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.mathworks.com!fu-berlin.de!zib-berlin.de!narses.hrz.tu-chemnitz.de!news.tu-chemnitz.de!irz401!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Server hardware considerations.. Date: 20 Feb 1996 22:29:25 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 42 Message-ID: <4gdi05$gsj@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <Pine.LNX.3.91.960219204849.14523A-100000@gallup.cia-g.com> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.3 Stephen Fisher <lithium@cia-g.com> writes: > RAM: 16 meg to start with, maybe 32, There aren't any special > considerations I should take when getting the RAM are there? Too bad that alot of chipsets don't support parity any more. I would otherwise suggest you sticking with parity-SIMMs. > Network: 3c509B. This is what I have now and it seems to be a very good > card. Hmm, i'm not convinced of it. Maybe it's only the FreeBSD driver that's not that robust like the driver for (e.g.) NE[12]000/3c503/ WD80[01]3 cards. However, going PCI, better get a good PCI card. I think the DEC-21040 based cards work very well. Failing that, plain ol' WD8013 or Lance-based cards (Isolink, NE2100) are the best choice for ISA, at least for FreeBSD. They all are able to saturate an Ethernet without very much CPU consumption. > Tape backup: SCSI.. I have no idea what is best, I am using a cheap > and slow floppy-tape drives right now and haven't been very pleased. DAT, but make sure that you cycle around enough cassettes, so failure of a single one wouldn't be catastrophic. DAT tapes are a bit fragile, and they are told to have a rather high abrasion. There are also people who generally distrust any helical-scan method drives, but that's becoming religous. :) Alternatively, i'm a happy user of a Tandberg 2.5 Gig QIC streamer right now (5 GB with hardware compression). The data rate is as high as DAT (source of comparision: the HP-DAT at work) when using 1 GB cartridges, much higher for 2.5 (or 5) GB. In the latter case, except for directly dd'ing, my disk is too lame to keep the drive streaming. :) -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)