On Tue, Oct 29, 2002 at 06:18:05AM -0500, Kevin Coyner wrote: > > Objective: need to layout a small LAN using 2 servers and 6 workstns > > > Equipment available: > > Server #1: Sun Sparcstation 20 with 2G HD, 256M RAM running Debian > > Server #2: PIII with RAID 1 (2x9G) and one 20G IDE HD, 512 RAM running > Debian > > > Services I want the servers to be running and available to the 6 users: > > DNS via Bind9
Running bind is a fairly trivial operation, so I would put it on the SparcStation. > Squid Proxy Server Running squid is both RAM and CPU intensive. I'd whack it on the PIII, and crank up the cache_mem setting into the hundreds of megabytes. Also, I've heard good things about AdZap (don't know the homepage, but I'm sure Freshmeat does: http://freshmeat.net/projects/adzap/, probably) for drastically increasing your cache hit rate. > POP3/IMAP mail (will DL to this box using Fetchmail,Procmail,Exim) If it's just handling mail for a few users, then this is a simple job too. Put it on the Sparc. If you decide to install spamassassin someday, by aware that it will _hammer_ your machine. If/when you want to use it, you might want to move mail over to the PIII, which will be easy if you setup your DNS cleverly (hint: create a CNAME called `mail' that everyone points at to send/receive mail. If you switch your machines around, you just need to update your DNS records and _not_ have to change anything on the client machines). > So the question is ... on which of the two servers should I deploy these > programs? Everything on the PIII? Er, answered above. You could easily put everything on the Sparc by itself, but for playing, er, reliability reasons you'll want to split them up. > Would you have a different recommendation if I wanted to run a website > using Apache/MySQL? Would I need yet another box to do this right? One of the beautiful things about Linux (and Unix in general, I'm sure) is that they can handle multiple things at once, and not bog down. You could put all the services you've listed here on your Sparc, and it'd work fine (might not scream, but it would work...). Plus, using things like DNS, NFS and LDAP, it's easy to shuffle things between machines if your needs grow. That said, I'd put Apache and MySQL on the PIII, just so you have room to grow if you decide to play with mod_perl or Tomcat or something equally RAM-hungry. For comparison, I have two machines: a PIII-450 with 256MB of RAM and a P166 with 64MB of RAM. The PIII is my workstation, and I can do most everything I want on it quite happily. It's connected, via Ethernet, to the P166. The Pentium box is my dial up gateway, DNS server, mail relay, database server, dictionary server, print server, shell server for some of my curious friends (it's locked down with ulimit and grsecurity, of course) and squid caching proxy server. It's hardly even awake most of the time: root@leserver:~# uptime 21:35:15 up 22 days, 46 min, 9 users, load average: 0.04, 0.03, 0.00 (It was at 80-odd days until I managed to lock myself out playing with shorewall (damn non-hot-pluggable PS/2 port!)). A SparcStation and a PIII with 512MB of RAM will easily handle most anything you can throw at them. As another f'rinstance, Slashdot was hosted on something like your SparcStation for the first year or so of it's life. > This is all for personal, non-commerical purposes. In another post you say you have a commercial router thingy. Do you have static IPs, or are you NAT'ing through it? If you have a bunch of static IPs, then the whole thing is easy: firewall everything but essential ports on the two machines, plug them into your switch and off you go. If you're using NAT, you'll need to do some hackage on the router. > Like many of us on this list, I'm simply addicted, want to keep > learning, and can't stop I know the feeling! -rob
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