On Thu, 26 Jul 2001, J. Scott Kasten wrote:

>
>The 166 Alphas are the faster of the boxes you are comparing.  You don't
>say exactly what your DSL data speed is, however, I can give you some
>concrete examples here:

The Multia's have two advantages:
1) They're faster.  This will be important if you're going to need to
ssh into the machine.
2) They have commodity expansions slots (PCI & PCMCIA) which are easier
to add a second interface to than Sbus.  This will be important for the
firewall.

The Multia's have one distinct disadvantage:
1) They're far less reliable than the Sparcs.

My suggestion:
Use a Multia for your firewall.  Allow ssh access to the firewall
machine, from which you can use r services on your private network.  Use
a couple of sparcs for your other servers, with the fastest sparc
with the most RAM and disk drawing the job of webserver.  The firewall
won't need much more disk space than the couple hunded megs a default
install of NetBSD takes up.  Keep the other Multia's around as cold
spares for the firewall.  If it dies of heat death, simply pop the hard
drive and network card out, move them to another Multia and keep on
trucking.

BTW, to increase Multia reliability, buy one of these:
http://www.maxcooler.com/casfan60byde.html
It's loud but my Multia is cool to the touch even when running
horizontally.  No, I do not work for them or get a kickback for
suggesting the product.

-- 
Brandon D. Valentine <bandix@looksharp.net>

The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common.  Instead
of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit
their views ... which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one
of the facts that needs altering.
	- Doctor Who, "Face of Evil"