From: htoaster@yabbs
To: washbord@yabbs
Subject: re: BSD vs. Linux.
Date: Mon Mar 21 09:11:16 1994

In message BSD vs. Linux., washbord said:
> Okay, am I crazy to hook NetBSD up to a 56K line?  Will BSD be stable 
> enough to run a multiuser system under extremely grueling conditions?  Or 
> should I fork out a couple thousand for some commercial Unix?  I've been 
> very pleased with BSD but I'm scared of having it choke out on me.

nope.  bsd is very stable with the proper hardware.  if you're going to do 
this i would reccomend using scsi disks (something i need to upgrade to
eventually) because the drivers for the adaptec 1542 card are much more
stable than the drivers for ide cards, plus the adaptec card uses dma which
makes it much faster in multitasking systems.

i know of a public access internet site that uses netbsd to run their news
system and nfs server with very little trouble.  they've been running it
since december, and usually get 30+ day uptimes.

how many users do you plan on having on the system?  what sort of hardware
are you expecting to run?  a 486/33 or 50 with 16 megs of memory, scsi
disks (one gig or so) and a network connection could probably sustain quite
a few users just fine.

by comparison, phred is a 486sx/25, two ide disks (400 megs total), 16 megs
of memory.  i allow up to 20 yabbs users (used to allow more and have seen
35 or 40), plus people whom i've given private accounts to.  i get pretty
good stability (well, not over the past few days, but i've been doing some
experimenting), and would get much better stability running w/ scsi (95% of
my crashes have to do with the ide driver).

alex