INN 2.3x and hardware

[Mike Fagan]

At 03:34 PM 9/21/00, Marco d'Itri wrote:

>On Sep 21, Bettina Fink <laura at hydrophil.de> wrote:
>
>  >We will set up a test environment the next weeks, but it would
>  >be nice to hear if someone already has experience in using INN
>  >2.3x on NetApp (with positive or negative results).
>I asked that some time ago, but somebody replied INN 2.3 cannot run off
>NFS because mmap is mandatory.
>And BTW, I think a netapp is too much expensive to use it for news.

I'm running it on NFS right now, and admittedly, it isn't great 
performance, but it works.  The thing I did notice upon upgrading to 2.3 
was that I had to turn on NFS file locking.  Under 2.2 and below I'd had it 
turned off, and when I started up 2.3 it complained quite a bit.

In any case, it depends on the NFS file server, but it can be done, and can 
be done well, however, like you said, cost is a big deal, and at the rate 
UseNet is growing, you have to make sure your NFS server can scale to the 
load, which we've found our NetApp F720 isn't doing so well.

We bought the NetApp back when I was planning on doing some funky 
distributed server system with tradspool, but with the releases of newer 
versions of INN we decided not to do it, which left us with a big, 
expensive piece of  hardware that we aren't really using like we should.

Luckily our network engineering department just bought a few NetCache 
servers, which use the same drives and drive shelves, so we've got a place 
to use them once I can get a new, faster drive array.

Mike, Sr. Systems Analyst @ Info Avenue Internet Services, LLC.