[tech] v6

[Grahame Bowland]

On Wed, May 28, 2003 at 10:55:29AM +0800, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> On Tue, May 27, 2003, Ian McKellar wrote:
> > On Tue, 2003-05-27 at 11:47, Simon Fryer wrote:
> > > There are reports of OpenBSD machines running multiple gigabit ethernet 
> > > cards without any problems - admittadly with more RAM and CPU, so any 
> > > 100Mb, Gb networking should scale happily from this base. The limiting 
> > > factor will be the PCI bus. 
> > > 
> > > Of course - a non-PC solution is better! :) 
> > 
> > The question is of course, can UCC get its hands on any non-PC solution
> > with a backplane thats actually faster than the PCI bus?
> 
> Why would you want to?

Another example of something we could do cheap and well by going down 
the PC path is /home. For a few hundred dollars a couple of 120Gb 
ATA100 drives could be purchased. These could then be mirrored, whacked 
into a Linux / BSD / Solaris x86 machine with a decent ATA100 card. 
They would /massively outperform/ morwong's disks.

These days, ATA really isn't that bad. Yes, you will get more
interrupts than on SCSI. However, in real life it's still going to be
faster than the ancient disks in morwong. In real life, it's going to be
massively cheaper. IDE disks are far easier to replace : if one of the
bricks in morwong goes along with all the disks, it'd cost a mint to get
the thing up and working again.

Yet we're still talking about acquiring ancient 4Gb disks for morwong 
and storageworks bricks. Morwong is a cute box and worth having around.
It's really sucking at serving /home though. And yes, a lot of this has 
to do with fragmentation, but we can still do better.

So, I'd like to propose that we get something recent (P3 or greater)
from somewhere, buy a decent ATA 100 controller for it (that is
well-supported by Linux and/or BSD) and stick 2 * 120Gb 7200RPM
Barracudas in it. Also give the host PC a couple of gigabytes of memory, 
just to be on the safe side.

We would need to test NFS locking and things like that; it'd be nice 
to get it working with Linux or BSD, but if necessary we could run 
Solaris x86.