On 6/24/2010 5:00 AM, [email protected] wrote:
> Would a net5501 reliably host a web site?

On a 5501 with a single PATA laptop drive, I'm current running the 
gateway machine and infrastructure support: OpenBSD, NAT'ing firewall 
for a 2 MBit symmetric DSL link, router for 3 different internal 
networks (external wired, internal wired DMZ, internal wired user, and a 
wireless AP for internal), DNS/DHCP/NTP/lpd server, squid proxy for web 
traffic, and Apache for some internal static web pages (including media 
files, the server has access to dozens of GB, but doesn't run scripts, 
nor high traffic).  Runs excellently.  It also runs an NFS server that 
only sees occasional use, and isn't blazingly fast (can not saturate the 
100 base T link), but so far I have not cared enough to figure out where 
the bottleneck is.

The next step wil be: upgrade the machine to be a 1TB file server; 
replace the 100GB PATA laptop disk with a SATA controller in the PCI 
slot and put two 1TB SATA disks on it (with software mirroring), boot 
from a CF card, and set up a NFS and Samba server; it will have to be 
able to saturate the 100BT link.  It's an open question whether whether 
the 5501 will be able to do that, from a CPU power and bandwidth standpoint.

The real limitation will probably be amount of memory: To run a 1TB file 
server under OpenBSD you really need to have at least 1GB of memory 
available to the file system (once the kernel has taken its part), so 
you can run fsck and have enough file system buffer space.  To have some 
space for applications, and for safety margin, the system should 
probably have 2GB of RAM, and you can't do that on a 5501.  We'll see 
whether this workload will fit in the 1/2GB of the 5501 (I'm willing to 
live with long boot times and swapping during fsck).

--
Ralph Becker-Szendy            ralph at lr dot los-gatos dot ca dot us
735 Sunset Ridge Rd, Los Gatos, CA 95033                  408-395-1435
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