Re: [seul-edu] Advice on Linux servers

[Les Richardson <richl@mail.tfsd.sk.ca>]

Hi,

The other article was right on the money, also. This has also been our
experience with all our routers and servers. We turn 'em on in September
and off in June (I'm from Canada...) They are cheap and reliable
appliances and have run for years...(dialups since '96, nonstop all school
year; servers since about '97 without a hitch and we've done some bad
things to them.) Forget the fancy stuff, they just work!

Les Richardson


On Mon, 10 Dec 2001, Dave Prentice wrote:

> I don't know if you're talking about a "big" router like Cisco, but my
> classroom has a 486-100 with a floppy and 16meg of RAM as the router. It
> runs freesco. There are 20 clients, and it's a 10mbit connection. So far it
> seems perfectly capable of meeting the demands of all the clients at once.
> It's so reliable that it's easy to forget it's there.
> Dave Prentice
> prentice@instruction.com
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Les Richardson <richl@mail.tfsd.sk.ca>
> To: seul-edu@seul.org <seul-edu@seul.org>
> Date: Monday, December 10, 2001 4:14 PM
> Subject: Re: [seul-edu] Advice on Linux servers
> 
> 
> >
> >> It is intended for SME and SOHO, but it could also be used
> >> in schools.
> >> It is more expensive than a box out of the shelf, but
> >> i guess it should perform much better.
> >> What are pros/cons of chosing a specfically assembled hardware
> >> to set up a router?
> >
> >We tend to use old hardware that we get donated. The primary consideration
> >is reliability (which the older stuff tends to have.) The primary problem
> >is fans stopping. If using an older thing, there's only a powersupply fan
> >to worry about.
> >
> >We tend to use a floppy based setup so don't have a hard drive to worry
> >about.
> >
> >The only final issue is performance. I have found that a 486-33 is too
> >slow to use a 384k connection reliably. (I am using an old pentium 100
> >which works fine.) I will test with a 486-66 when I get a chance. I'm
> >using the LRP setup (linuxrouter.org) and it works fine.
> >
> >I'm using several 386-40's with the latest USR modems. I have setup them
> >up with 40MB hard drives and they do demand dial for our school. We use
> >several phone lines with squid caches on several servers. The squids are
> >siblings and we use round robin dns on the caches to spread the load
> >across all workstations.
> >
> >Les Richardson
> >H. Hardcastle School
> >Edam, Sk. Canada
> >
> >
> >
>