DNS hardware

Kevin Darcy kcd at daimlerchrysler.com
Tue Nov 14 02:20:19 UTC 2000


I have it on good authority that Solaris' "64-bit architecture" consists
largely of kludges on top of 32-bit code. At least this was supposedly true as
of about 6 months ago (when was Solaris 8 released?). Even if it's not terribly
kludgey, I doubt that BIND would benefit a lot from 64-bit architecture. If
you're going to run BIND 8, I'd probably say go with the Linux/Intel solution
and use the extra money for more servers and/or more memory if you can.

Looking to the future, though, BIND 9 *can* take better advantage of multiple
processors, with proper support from the OS, so if you ever get to the point
that you need that capability, you should look at which platform handles
multiprocessing better. At the risk of starting a religious war, I'd speculate
that Solaris can probably do that better, if for no other reason than because
Sun has been doing it longer and has more experience (e.g. StarFire) in the
high-end multiprocessor market.

Don't forget, of course, that Solaris can run on Intel. Linux can run on
SPARC too, can't it? (But why, other than saving a few bucks, would anyone want
to?)


- Kevin

Philip Thomas wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> My question is simple, and directed to those with a bit more experience then
> with larger DNS server scenario's. I am attempting to make a decision if I
> should buy a SUN SPARC workstation/server, like and ultra SPARC 5 or bigger,
> or a really high powered Linux workstation, something a PIII800 with at
> least 512MB of memory and a U3 SCSI drive and controller.
>     Now my current named daemon on initial load uses approx. 30-40 MB, after
> a day or so it will run at about 50-70MB, and will idle there for as long
> the server is running- actually it grows as we add domains and receive a lot
> of queries. As many of you can imagine, this is a lot, why is it so big  ?
> Because we just have a LOT! of domains, a lot of heavy MX, A, and PTR
> lookups. So, I am well aware that I can setup a system by which we can load
> balance all the DNS requests across multiple server, but my dilemma is this
> :  now that I am at the point of needing to design a high powered DNS
> scenario I would like to choose the best platform to do it on. In other
> words, which operating system is harden or has the right kind of
> architecture to handle the needs BIND. My initial thought is that SUN
> SOLARIS, with it's 64-bit I/O architecture, is a perfect fit, but at the
> same time, I thought that gee x86-32Bit based PC's are inexpensive, but
> appear to be really high powered. So my dilemma is should I spend the extra
> money and invest in a true 64-bit UNIX platform ? Or should I just build a
> really high powered Linux X86 box ?
>     I think, and I need some input for the DNS community at large, that BIND
> can take advantage of a 64-bit architecture, thus effortlessly handling all
> DNS queering. On the other hand, I think that BIND is not that sophisticated
> of an application, and regardless of architecture it will operate at the
> same level regardless 32bit or 64bit. So using 32-bit architecture will meet
> my needs now and into the future.
>
> Any thoughts comment or suggestions or even pointers are appreciated
>
> And for the curious what my setup is:
>
> 2 DNS servers identically configuration:
> PII 300
> 256MB of memory
> U2 9.01 7200 RPM drives
> 100MB NIC card
> Redhat version 6.2
> BIND version 8.2.2 patch level 7
>
> Thank you all, Phil






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