Subject: Re: NetBSD - ready for prime-time fileserving?
To: Lou GLASSY <glassy@caesar.cs.montana.edu>
From: Herb Peyerl <hpeyerl@beer.org>
List: current-users
Date: 10/08/1999 05:24:26
Lou GLASSY <glassy@caesar.cs.montana.edu>  wrote:
 > Let's say the worst-case peak load would be 50 unix nfs clients and 
 > and 50 windows smb clients, simultaneously.  (50+70 != 50+50, but 
 > some of the clients are dual boot boxes, so they can only be doing
 > either nfs or smb, but not both at the same time.)
 > 
 > Is NetBSD's nfs and smb subsystems robust enough to handle
 > this sort of load?  Has anyone already "deployed" (gack, hate that word)
 > NetBSD boxes as departmental fileservers?  I myself have used
 > NetBSD for two or three years now, just as a desktop general
 > purpose workstation, and I have heard of many
 > NetBSD systems being used as webservers, routers, etc at ISPs, 
 > but haven't heard of NetBSD being used in a primary fileserver role.

We've "deployed" a NetBSD box at a customer site where it is being used as
an "everything server"... ie: it does NFS for 6 or so NFS clients, about
60 windows SMB clients, about 50 netatalk Mac clients... Runs a few print
queues, plus a whole whack of seperate jserv-powered development websites.

The machine is a simple PII/450 running 1.4.  Has 5 18G disks on an 
Adaptec 2940UW, 384MB of ram and an Intel Etherexpress 10/100...

With an earlier release of NetBSD it was suffering from bi-monthly mystery
"panics" but that seems to have been solved with 1.4 I think... Other than
that, there've been no complaints about speed to my knowledge... All of the
Mac's are graphic designers who store their project data on the server so
during a typical workday, the disks get a decent work-out...