I've just set up a Quadra 950 I found at the town dump as our home server.
It came with 24 MB of memory. I've added a 4GB Seagate Barracuda as the root
disk and a 36GB Quantum 7200 RPM SCSI disk as the /Users disk. 

The machine is running a mash of NetBSD 1.5.2 kernel with 1.5 user-space
(haven't had time to re-install since the Wasabi 1.5.2 CD showed up, and not
going to download all of user-space on a 56K dialup). I'm using the built-in
10 Mbit ethernet, and installed whatever version of netatalk that I got from
the package installer.

I hope to use this machine as the central repository for our MP3's, but I'm
a bit worried about the performance of the Apple File Protocol in netatalk.
When I did a finder copy of our MP3 collection to the NetBSD server, I only
got a data-rate of about 333 KBytes/sec. The source machine was a PowerMac
7200 with a 266 MHz G3 and 256 MB DRAM running OS 9.1, over 100baseT
ethernet to a 10/100 switch, then to the Quadra 950 running NetBSD. Since
the source machine was running OS 9.1, I presume I was running AFP over
TCP/IP.

I had hoped to see something closer to the 1MB/sec theoretical maximum for
10baseT ethernet. I'm a bit worried about trying to serve multiple MP3
streams using AFP on this machine. The NetBSD machine seemed relatively idle
during the transfer - CPU and memory utilization were low (single digits),
and disk I/O's were steady at about 16 per second, which should be only
about 15% to 20% utilization for the disk. Is the bottleneck in the 10 Mb/s
ethernet port on the Quadra 950 - would I get substantially better
performance if I hunted down a 100baseT Nubus card? Or is there a
performance bug in the 1.5.2 NCR driver?

Or is there some other bottleneck? I'm surprised the CPU utilization wasn't
higher - maybe I misread the vmstat display.


On another note, I had some difficulty installing 1.5 on this machine, as
the Installer apparently doesn't support partitions greater than 500 MB. It
will install on a 1 GB or a 2 GB partition, but running fsck after booting
shows a terribly corrupted file system. The 1.5.1 Installer shows the same
behavior. I ended up creating 500 MB partitions for root, /var, and /usr in
order to install, and using the remaining 2.5 GB on the root disk for
nothing in particular. Is this a well-known limitation of the Installer?


TIA.

Regards,
-Steve

Steve Byan
<smb@world.std.com>