Cost-effective servers
First of all, my debian machines are running terrifically well, so thanks to all who have labored long and hard to produce such a quality product!! I am helping my local school district in Maine establish networks and servers. We are farthest along at the high school with about a 120 node ethernet mostly macs. Currently we have a jerry-built 586 PCI, 16MB, ATAPI CD, 2GB IDE linux box we have been using as a testbed for services. One very important service we offer is appleshare using netatalk. One directory is set up read-only and used for common applications and data. Additionally, many students have logins and have their own appleshare volumes (a directory in their home directory). This allows them to park documents in there and get at them from any node without having to lug diskettes. Also students can create a 'public_html' directory and drop appropriate documents in there which are then available on the web server (see below). Finally, using the hfs_fs module, we have experimented with sharing mac CD's, e.g. encyclopedias, with much success - AND I have dd'd some CD's directly into a raw disk partition, mounted them with hfs_fs and it works even better! Encouraged by this success, we hope to put 10 to ? CD's up on raw partitions and share them via netatalk - one has to watch copyright issues of course. We also run apache, both accessing our internal web docs and as a proxy. (BTW I will probably hack the apache source in the next week or so to support proxy authentication if anyone is interested - unless the apache guys beat me to it). We only have a 56K connection to the internet, so good proxying is essential to good performance particularly when teachers are having students access the same web sites. We cache up to 500MB. Obviously we need more 'oomph' in the server(s). The questions are simply: . One server or more than one . SCSI or IDE I.e, given a few thousand bucks, how to get the most server bang! BTW it would be nice to have an optimization model for this sort of thing where one could categorize application services, hardware, and costs in a quantitative way to aid in decision-making - capacity planning for Linux! Thanks, Michael -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word unsubscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
module cdu31a fails on insert
I am installing debian 1.1.1 from the August Pacific Hi Tech CD on my Gateway 200 PS-60. Things go OK until I try to add the cdu31a module to support the CDU33A CDROM drive in the Gateway: it fails to insert. The drive is defaulted onto 0x340; when I try to add a parameter to the module insertion it either fails the same way or gives me an invalid parameter message. So perhaps I am providing the parameter in the wrong format (could not find any documentation with the distribution on the format of module parameters) - or something else is wrong. Everything works OK using Slackware 3.0 kernel 1.2.13 with cdu31a support in the kernel. Thanks, Michael Laing
re: installation boot fails with standard bootdisk on 486SX/33
I previously wrote: Installation fails on this old machine shortly after hitting return at the 'Boot Parameters' prompt using the standard bootdisk. Linux 1.2.13 runs fine. Additional info: after hitting return I get from 3 to 6 dots and then a 'bad disk' message. The disk is not bad, however. I divine from the messages I have seen that this is a problem with the boot loader on the boot disk, not linux. Also, that disabling cache may work to get by this problem. Unfortunately, disabling cache did not work. This machine is old but useful. I am helping a school district in Maine which has many such old machines and will likely be donated a lot more. We are trying to standardize on Debian so that the 20 to 50 people involved in support across the 10 buildings and 200 square miles of the district will have a common approach. The easy thing to do would be to upgrade the motherboard. Anyone have any other suggestions? Thanks, Michael Laing
installation boot fails with standard bootdisk on 486SX/33
Installation fails on this old machine shortly after hitting return at the 'Boot Parameters' prompt using the standard bootdisk. Linux 1.2.13 runs fine. I suspect (based upon bug reports) that APM is enabled in the kernel on the standard bootdisk and that this is the problem. I propose to install on another machine and create a custom bootdisk for this old (but useful) dog. Does anyone have any pointers or is there a suitable bootdisk image somewhere I can use? I am installing from the August Pacific HiTech CD and have internet access. Thanks, Michael Laing
