Fedora on servers

[Bill Gradwohl]

Ow Mun Heng wrote:

>We just announced our 320GB using 107GB/pl(3 platters) technology.
>Not sure if Seagate or others are using 4 platters.
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>
We didn't spec the drive, as there was only one choice. Hitachi was the 
only game in town at the time, so the client decided to order them. They 
waited 4 months for delivery. I would have preferred WD or Seagate, but 
any port in a storm. We'll see how they hold up.

>>
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>Tried TYAN - don't like them. Why?
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BIOS. On several mainboards we tried, we couldn't successfully configure 
the BIOS to get rid of interupt issues.

> 1 Gig of RAM for web surfing!! wow.. Ram ain't that cheap.

What else am I going to use that RAM for? Its special RAM for a 
particular mainboard, so it goes along with the board. We learned long 
ago that RAM for one board isn't necessarily suitable in another board.

>Which One? Need to look them up. Does any have more than 2? Prefer to
>have 3. 
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>
I never bought into that DMZ thinking, so 2 NICs is enough for us on a 
firewall. If I really needed another NIC I'd just put one into one of 
the many empty bus slots. We put Internet reachable boxes behind the 
firewall, but not on a DMZ. I've heard all the reasons for setting up a 
DMZ, but the logic doesn't hold up IMHO.

Every server we've ever built has several slots available for "other" 
equipment. We used the 4 in 1 boards from Adaptec and SMC a long time 
ago. I see no need for them today as switches and routing solved the 
problem the multiport boards were brought in for in the old days.

I would caution you on using boards with too much "stuff" built in. 
Their BIOS's will typically force you to use interrupts that are shared 
simply because there's no other way to get all that stuff organized 
given the measely interrupt structure on todays boards. Same holds true 
for adding boards to slots to some extent, but usually you have more 
leeway when the mainboard itself isn't choked with extraneous gear. 
Shared interrupts are what we avoid at all cost.

>Yep..Yep.. Yep.. It always pay to get an opinion on a board since most
>times dealers don't know if it Item X will work with Linux and I can't
>convince them to let me try it out.
>
>Thanks. (Now if you can tell me which Asus board that is.)
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>
Check out their latest comparison sheet on their US web site - 
http://usa.asus.com/index.htm . I can't recall the model numbers of the 
mainboards with 2 NICs. They were socketed for AMD chips and were real 
cheap for firewall use. Anything can handle the traffic for a T1 or 
less, so a board with 2 NICs of any kind, even 10mbps is sufficient. If 
I were firewalling internally, say between departments on a high 
bandwidth lan, then I'd use high end NICs to handle the load, and they 
wouldn't be built in as the built in kind are most often not the best in 
thruput performance. You get what you pay for.

The monster box we put together with all those drives used the ASUS 
*NRL-LS533*. We've also used their *PR-DLS533*. All with Crucial RAM, 
all bought at the same time - "matched".

If you send me a few dozen of those 320Gig drives to keep, I'll test 
them for you. :-)

-- 
Bill Gradwohl
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