BIND/SMTP/DHCP Server sizing/Operating system question

Brad Knowles brad.knowles at skynet.be
Mon Jun 11 16:46:38 UTC 2001


At 9:58 AM -0600 6/11/01, Randy Adams wrote:

>  1) can/should I provide these 3 services on one box?

	Technically, yes.  However, this is not the way to build a 
robust, highly available, and scalable system.  You're much better 
off separating these tasks onto separate sets of machines dedicated 
to performing each role, etc....

>  2) *If it were you*, would you fork out for a commercially supports hw/sw
>  combo, or would you 'trust' Linux?

	Depends on the application.

	For example, if this was for a highly classified system to 
provide remote support for operational special forces units in the 
field, and there were literally many lives depending on the thing 
working 100.00000000% correct 100.000000000% of the time (some of 
whom could take failures personally, and then decide to hold you and 
your family personally responsible), then I would make damn sure that 
I spent as much money as needed to get completely redundant systems 
with fail-over guarantees, and every other single ounce of 
reliability I could possibly get.  Whomever the presidents & CEOs 
were of the various companies involved, I would make sure that they 
all had tamper-proof remote detonation devices attached to their 
genitalia, and I would be the only one with the necessary access 
methods to press the buttons.

	If this was for a large financial institution, with tens of 
trillions of dollars under management and hundreds of billions of 
dollars of daily turn-over, I would likewise spend very large 
quantities of money to ensure that the possibility of even a 
momentary failure would be reduced to many positions to the right of 
the decimal point.

	If this was for a University, where there are going to be lots of 
kids and faculty members playing around on the system and doing 
${DEITY}-only-knows-what, and where your personal daily lunch budget 
compares favourably with their annual IT budget, then I'd probably be 
willing to use FreeBSD, OpenBSD, or some other freely available OS 
that I really trusted to do the job right, with a minimum of cost.

	Obviously, depending on your particular situation, you might fall 
somewhere between some of these examples.

>  3) Any reccomendations on processor/ram/disk requirements

	You haven't told us enough about the application.  Without a lot 
more detail, there's absolutely no way of knowing what kind of 
performance you might need, how much RAM you might need, etc....

>  4) What version on Bind is the most sercure/stable?

	I would say that this would be BIND 9.1.2-REL or the latest 
release candidate for 9.1.3, and shortly this should be 9.2.0.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

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