This penguin walks on a bed of blue screens of death!

Lincoln Peters lincoln_peters at hotmail.com
Fri Oct 5 20:03:22 PDT 2001


>From: ME <dugan at passwall.com>
>Reply-To: <talk at nblug.org>
>To: talk at nblug.org
>Subject: Re: This penguin walks on a bed of blue screens of death!
>Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2001 15:38:14 -0700 (PDT)
>
>On Fri, 5 Oct 2001, Lincoln Peters wrote:
> > The third harddrive is an older SCSI, but do you really think that a 
>SCSI-3
> > would work on a 486?
>
>Actually, if you have more than 3 clients connected to that server, each
>client will probably not feel very responsive for heavy file
>access/loading - - especially over a larger network with a larger
>collision domain and greater utilization by other users to better
>approximate user saturation. A SCSI controller may speed things up a bit,
>but the best speedups would likely be found in the thernet/network
>(switched) with multiple interfaced and load balanced support *and* a fast
>bus on the server. Disk access is still likely an issue, but probably
>won't show up so much until the other bottlenecks are addressed.

I tried to put in 3 ethernet cards: a generic NE2000, a 3Com EtherLink II, 
and an 3Com Etherlink III, but I was only able to make one work at a time.  
Since it worked with just one card anyway, I removed both of the 3Coms and 
left the NE2000.

>
> > One IDE controller, don't know what kind (but it's not built into the
> > motherboard):
>
>If it is a very long card with what looks like a 16bit ISA with an extra
>part below it for the long card to plug into as well, then possibly VLB.
>(Very Long Bus)

No, its an ISA.  The same card has the floppy drive controller (although I 
removed the floppy drive; it was using valuable drive bays), two serial 
ports, and a parallel port.

>
> > hda: 250MB total capacity, one 32MB swap partition, the other 218MB are 
>used
> > by the root filesystem (ext2 filesystem).
> > No hdb.
>
>That is good for the local server sysem, but only with the test
>server. Once you start adding clients and users using those clients
>booting, and loading files/libs, things will slow down.

Is that still true if the libraries for the clients are all on the sdb disk?

>
> > Two SCSI harddrives on an Adaptec AHA-something ISA controller:
> > sda: 2GB total capacity, 1GB for /usr (reiserfs filesystem), 1GB for 
>/home
> > (reiserfs filesystem).
> > sdb: 3GB total capacity, all used by /netboot (ext2 filesystem).  
>/netboot
> > is the filesystem used by the netbooting workstations.
>
>out of all the drive interfaces on the 486 you mention, the SCSI interface
>serems likely the best for the exported net boot root, but with the
>disclaimer stated about about adding many users causing contention for
>resource issues on the server/network.

That makes sense.  Besides, I've found old IDE to have problems with new 
drives (those with more than xxxx cylinders)


Do you (or anyone else) know anything about bonding Ethernet devices?  If I 
could get the other two NIC cards to do that, I'd re-install them.  If the 
network supports >10Mbps (I honestly don't know, but it should), 30Mbps will 
definitely be better than 10Mbps.  I would try to bump it up to 4 NIC's, but 
there aren't enough expansion slots for a fourth (unless I remove the video 
card).


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