LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Richard Sharpe <sharpe@ns.aus.com>
  To  : David Lloyd <lloy0076@rebel.net.au>
        <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 19:50:08 +1000

Re: Coax Network/Internet Speed Question

At 11:19 AM 11/30/00 +1030, David Lloyd wrote:
>
>Hi!
>
>I've finally managed to reactivate my second computer which is a:
>
>* 450MHZ k6-III [1]
>* 64 Mb RAM
>* relatively slow hard drive
>
>As in relatively slow, it's the current bottleneck on the computer. I
>use Coax which is, I think, only 10mb/s so the network isn't
                                  ^^^^^^

That should be 10Mb/s, unless your setup is such that you actually get 10
milli-bits per second.

>extraordinarily fast [2]. Now, if I've got it correct given that I'm the
>only one using this machine on the network (there are only two machines
>on the network) and it isn't a file server [3], the speed of my coax and
>the hard drive won't particularly matter.

10Mb/s is ~ 1MB/s, which is not slow, especially compared to your ISP
access rate.

However, if you are concerned, a pair of 10/100 cards (RTL8139-based) and a
cross-over cable is cheap enough ... Ought be less than $100, and possibly
closer to $50.

>Especially since I use a very inexpensive, but slow ISP [4].
>
>Now, I also intend to use:
>
>* a full blown name server (BIND 8.2.latest-stable)
>* SendMail
>* DHCP
>* SSHD
>
>The SendMail will act as a relay for my main machine which will still
>deal with all of my e-mail.
>
>From my understanding, none of these utilities/programs or such are
>terribly disk intensive so my slow hard drive wouldn't kill them.
>Furthermore, my slow Coax network wouldn't essentially be a bottle neck
>either, or would it....
>
>What's peoples' opinion on this?
>
>DL
>
>[1]
>I think a 500MHZ K6-II would have been faster :-(
>
>[2]
>Yes, I know. Coax...irck...but it's what I've got and I don't have a
>twisted pair cable and unless there's a reason I'm not wasting $25 to
>get one
>
>[3]
>The hard drive is only about 1 Gig or something
>
>[4]
>Don't get me wrong - for ~30-35 AUD I get about 360 hours per month with
>unlimited downloads and I've downloaded heaps in terms of mail, ftp and
>http
>
>PS:
>Interestingly, I have managed to make StarOffice 5.2 by Sun (not an
>OpenOffice version) go fast! How? Stack 383MB of memory into an Athlon
>650MHZ with a reasonably fast hard drive...rebuild the kernel using
>Athlon GCC (based on pgcc) [i] and in fact it loads in, like, 2 seconds
>and I now think my latest bottleneck is the hard drive system...sigh...I
>want to eventually implement a RAID2 (or is it 1...where you basically
>write/read alternatively to two drives, striping I think is the
>technical term) with two 7200RPM drives....
>
>[i]
>Not for the faint hearted. I feel over the "-O3 and above have serious
>bug" problem...and I would get things like "Register EAX....cannot
>derefence NULL pointer errors" at start up and other odd times...and it
>nearly crashed my damn file system - lucky I realised what was happening
>and powered down before it did whatever it was doing too badly [ii].
>
>[ii]
>The advantages of having multiple, smaller partitions as opposed to one
>huge partition, is that file system crashes will hopefully choose to
>trash something like /usr or /usr/local or /tmp or /etc or /home rather
>than /boot or / :-)
>
>-- 
>Are you:
> - waiting for rigor mortis to set on?
> - or waiting for Santa Claus to arrive?
> (see Eric Berne, Beyond Games and Scripts)
>
>-- 
>LinuxSA WWW: http://www.linuxsa.org.au/  IRC: #linuxsa on irc.linux.org.au
>To unsubscribe from the LinuxSA list:
>  mail linuxsa-request@linuxsa.org.au with "unsubscribe" as the subject
>
>

Regards
-------
Richard Sharpe, sharpe@ns.aus.com
Samba (Team member, www.samba.org), Ethereal (Team member, www.zing.org)
Contributing author, SAMS Teach Yourself Samba in 24 Hours
Author, Special Edition, Using Samba


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