Moving to Intel

Date: Tue, 14 Jan 1997 15:07:24 -0400
From: Landon Boyd <landon@chebucto.ns.ca>
To: Eric Howland <ehowland@uwex.edu>
cc: csuite-dev <csuite-dev@chebucto.ns.ca>

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On Sat, 11 Jan 1997, Eric Howland wrote:

> Recently DANEnet has had some security concerns (shell access not unlike the
> recent messages to the list) and our hosts University of Wisconsin Extension
> has asked that we move to a separate machine (DANEnet and the UWEX web
> server were sharing the same AIX box).  It seems very likely that this new
> machine will be Intel. At the time we move, I would like to move to csuite.
> Since version 5+ runs on both Linux and Solaris I wonder if there is a
> consensus about  Solaris for Intel vs. Linux.  

My somewhat biased opinion is that Linux would be the way to go.  Probably
the two best reasons for using Linux are 1) it's 100% free and 2) you have
the source, so security fixes or support for new hardware can quickly be
compiled into the kernel.  I don't know how Solaris handles the variety of
hardware available for PC's.

> My gut response is that there are many more resources for Linux available.
> But about a year ago a graduate student who had helped us said that he had
> some experience that tended toward Solaris for a production machine.  A
> calendar year is a lot of net years and I wonder what experience csuite
> users have had.  Also, if most of you are using one system, it seems like a
> benefit to be on the same platform. 

I would say that the majority of the requests we've had have been from
Linux sites although we have no real statistics to back this up.  Most of
our development at this time is on Linux systems.

> I also am trying to determine the specifications for the machine.  We have a
> small system by freenet standards with hundreds of users rather than
> thousands and currently only 16 telephone lines.   Our Web server gets about
> 400,000 hits /month recently.   I believe that the increased functionality
> of csuite would increase those numbers.   

I would be very interested to see how a Pentium/Pentium Pro system running
Linux would handle this many simultaneous users with an active web server. 
We haven't had the opportunity to test this many users on our Pentium
machines, but I would imagine that a Pentium 150+ with 128 megs RAM would
handle such a load.  Again, I'd be really curious to see some hard facts
concerning this.


Landon

==================================================================
Landon Boyd                          landon@chebucto.ns.ca
Distribution Support Technician,     http://chebucto.ns.ca/~landon
Chebucto Community Net               902-455-4099hm 902-494-2449wk
==================================================================


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