dns server sizing?

[Pete Naylor]

In article <329.937994907 at kludge.mpn.cp.philips.com>,
	Jim Reid <jim at mpn.cp.philips.com> writes:
> 
> Personally I favour PCs running BSD/OS. The hardware's cheap and the
> OS is rock-solid and has excellent support.

Just to give another viewpoint, I found BSD/OS to be antiquated junk, and
the support was certainly nothing to write home about.  In short, the
product was a complete rip-off.  There are superior BSD OSs for PC
hardware which are free of cost.  Having said that, I wouldn't bother
considering PC hardware - it tends to be poor quality and is not nearly
as flexible about remote management as Sun's products.  Using Sparc
hardware means you also get to use Solaris on the platform for which it
has best support - in my opinion it is a significantly better OS than
BSD/OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux etc.

> It also happens to be one
> of the development platforms for BIND. I'm not too fond of Solaris as
> a name server platform because of all the nsswitch.conf, DOORS, nscd,
> nis, nis+, etc cruft that gets in the way of quick name/address
> lookups.

All of the above is either false or irrelevant.

> For a global net, you probably want a global hardware supplier so that
> getting spares and hardware repairs is painless.

Sun hardware is available where you need it.

> It wouldn't be nice
> to have to wait a week to ship a motherboard (or whatever) to some
> office in the boonies, have hassles with customs and couriers, etc.

That's what spares are for.

> This is another reason for choosing a PC. In an emergency, you can
> alwasy pick up an ethernet card or a fan or even a new CPU at the
> corner computer shop.

And there's a good chance it will be cheap crap and will cause much
frustration too.  Time is too valuable to me to fritter it away on
poorly designed hardware in hopes of saving a few dollars.

I would look long and hard at used Sparc 20s.  They're very affordable,
and make excellent, reliable, expandable work-horses for these kinds of
applications.  If you want something more powerful, look at the AXi and
AXmp products offered at <http://www.cwiq.com/>

-- 
/*-------------------------------------------------------------*
 * Peter James Naylor ## SysAdmin, Supernal Technologies, Inc. *
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    * pete at filter.supernal.net ## <http://www.supernal.net> *
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