Advice needed on Slice Setup on new install

[charlescosby]

Hello all,

I have been playing with FreeBSD 4.7 and installed it on a proliant 6000 and
so far it works great. The first install went without a hitch and
considering how many times I fought with Linux over the years I am truly
impressed. It took all the defaults and was up and running within an hour.

At this point I am looking for advice as to setup of this system. The
hardware is as follows:

ProLiant 6000 with 4 - PII 400 Xeon processors
2.7 gig of ram
First RAID on Smart 2DH with 2 - 9.1 gig drives mirrored - 9 gig slice
Second RAID on SMART 2/P with 5 - 9.1 Gig drives striped with offline
spare - 27 Gig slice

This machine will be used as an FTP server and file server located inside
our network behind a firewall. The traffic would be very minimal - 3 or 4
FTP users and 20 or 30 internal users a day maximum.

What would be a good arrangement for swap space and mounts. I have read
that 2X the ram would be a good size for a swap partition. Does a system
with 2.7 gig really need 5 gig of swap space? Would it be better to put the
swap half on one raid and half on the other? Is it much to get the SMP
working? I also have a ProLiant 3000 with similar setup (though only 4.3
gig first raid, 54 gig second raid and 512 meg of ram) I also want to set up
at home.

Heck, I even got KDE to run although the desktop was too big for the
monitor. I had to move the mouse to the sides to see the whole desk. The
built in video cards only have one meg of ram. Is there any way to make the
desktop and the monitor the same size?

Thanks for any help you may give.
Chuck

 

[xazax]

Well, I dont have a whole lot of helpful information to offer you on this one.

I am glad you like FreeBSD. I fought with Linux for years and stuck around with it to view its progress. Linux has come a long way from when I first started using it.

Linux is a very nice server, but despite what people say, Linux has a very nice and stable Desktop too. With Star Office I can open up Power Point Files and browse their slide shows.

I mainly use Linux for Graphics with gimp and am very happy with it running on my ATI Radeon 7500 at a fair resolution.
I have to do tweaks to make Counter Strike look better through Wine, but that will come at its time.

Trying to configure X on FreeBSD 4.4 was almost like trying to configure it on my Red Hat 5.x or older Caldera. I did get KDE up, but on this monitor, I knew I had to work extra time to configure X to look like my SuSE8.0.

I use Linux and FreeBSD 4.4 actively on my Home LAN. I use each for what I like best out of each. Sure maybe they could all perform equally if not close running Apache, but I like working with Apache on FreeBSD 4.4 and Slackware 7.1 over SuSE or RedHat. I use RedHat for Samba, SuSE as a workstation,all of them for NFS servers, and FreeBSD also acts as my router to my PPPoE connection.

Its really up to you. I would go for a video card that has more than 2mb of memory. Windows95 may play games and movies with a 2mb video card, but thats Windows. Microsoft focuses on GUIs and they do okay at it. X-Windows is more complex than Microsoft. X-Windows is really a protocol that is not part of the Unix kernel. For that reason, I think it has much more potential than MS-Windows, but at the same time, I would rather go for the easier stuff on somethings than others.

Not to sell you on Solaris, but Solaris or SGI Irix, work on highly powerful graphics with supporting drivers for their hardware. I would love one of those, except I could not afford one in a lifetime. Yes Very Expensive, but it works!!

Bottom line. Find a better machine with a better video card, or go with any Linux Distro that works best for you as far as X-Windows is concerned, they have come a long way to develop drivers for a number of video cards, that even though not the latest, they are still nice video cards. Use FreeBSD as a conlsole based server. Another opinion would be that a GUI or X-Windows is resource intensive becasue video is a heavy work load. A server does not need any type of GUI to be a server. Without the pretty colors, your FreeBSD would be faster and less error prone. If you dont like my idea or opinion, read on exporting the X-Server to another computer. Its the reverse of what client/server means, and even reverse to your desireable idea, but it might also give you a new idea or approach to this problem.

Anyways I talked more than I wanted to, but you get the points.

Laters, have fun...