Planning a new NNTP server.

[bill davidsen]

In article <75634F04BFCFD511BF69009027DC8649410B9B at mailman.thenap.com>,
Drew Weaver  <drew.weaver at thenap.com> wrote:
| 
| 	Well, we are a long time user of Typhoon, but I guess every time the
| company that owns the rights to Typhoon changes you have to buy a new
| support contract in order to get new versions or even to get a copy of the
| old version that you paid $10000 dollars for ;-) /rantoff. Ok I guess I'm
| going to try and use INN for our NNTP server, my question is, what is a
| decent system configuration for a news server these days?

I shouldn't tell you this, but if you have a valid license you can
probably download the current version from the web site. I do that with
Twister.

| This is a box I have available right now.
| 
| 2x1.13ghz PIII
| 1024 MB / ram

Your power is good, your RAM is okay until you get too many readers.

| 4 X 16.9GB Scsi-3 drive

With a full feed that will give you a retention of about two hours :-(
for text only it will probably be okay. It would be nice to have more
drives to spread head motion, again it may not be an issue.

| I'm going to put linux on this server (redhat).
| 
| I assume 80 GB is pretty small for a USENET server, so how much space does a
| respectable server need? Also is IDE still too slow for this type of
| application?

Saying IDE is like saying SCSI. The only difference is that IDE is much
better about things at least working with one another. If that's old
ATA-33 it will probably not work well. If the drives have 128k of cache
it will not work well. Cheap IDE is now ATA-100, good is ATA-133, serial
is ATA-150. Decent drives now have 2MB of cache.

What I'm telling you is that you should invest in a new controller, like
a Promise or similar, and hang new drives on it. More drives are better,
more controllers are allowed, one drive per cable instead of two will
help with read more than write.

Decide what you have to do on retention and content and then ask again
if the answer doesn't jump out at you. There are some relatively cheap
solutions which provide "looks like SCSI" interfaces at dirt cheap
prices by using ATA drives, one per controller, and a caching controller
which connects to the motherboard via dual LVD-160 channels. If you have
some budget that's a possibility.
-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.