*BSD News Article 25181


Return to BSD News archive

Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!usc!howland.reston.ans.net!gatech!udel!newsserv.cs.sunysb.edu!stark.UUCP!stark!stark!gene
From: stark!gene@newsserv.cs.sunysb.edu (Gene Stark)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: Yuck.  A New 386BSD User
Date: 20 Dec 93 09:16:41
Organization: Gene Stark's home system
Lines: 22
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <STARK!GENE.93Dec20091641@stark.uucp>
References: <2f3b6p$pj1@r-node.io.org>
NNTP-Posting-Host: stark.uucp
In-reply-to: tsangc@r-node.io.org's message of 19 Dec 1993 23:54:49 -0500

In article <2f3b6p$pj1@r-node.io.org> tsangc@r-node.io.org (Calum Tsang) writes:

>   I have a few questions about 386BSD.  We're running 386BSD in hopes of
>   building a server to serve 445 accounts (students) for mail and news services,
>   with a 14400 bps slip connection to our university's mainframes.  The machine
>   is a AMI BIOS C&T AMD386DX25, with 2 MB onboard and 6 MB on a Boca Research
>   BOCAram AT/Plus, with two 8250 serial uarts and a 16450 uart.  We have 85 MB
>   of IDE disk storage, but will be moving to 340 very soon.

If I were you, I wouldn't use 386BSD for this.  Use FreeBSD (I know more
about this) or maybe NetBSD 0.9 (I don't know anything about this).
386BSD has many, many bugs that have been fixed in either FreeBSD or NetBSD,
and you will waste a lot of time over these bugs if you try to use 386BSD
in a "production" environment.

Also, 340MB is way too small for serving 445 users.  I know it costs money,
but if you can swing it, you should get a 2GB SCSI drive.  Also, I would
put 16MB of RAM on the system (but no more, unless you have an EISA system).
You will just be saving yourself headaches later.

							- Gene Stark
--