-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hello, On Apr 21, 2008, at 15:46, Al - image hosting services wrote:
Hi, On Mon, 21 Apr 2008, Michael Lorenz wrote:On Apr 21, 2008, at 08:38, De Served wrote:Al - image hosting services wrote:I am looking at possibly using an SGI system as a webserver. I would like to be able to put 3 drives in it and possibly an extra network card. Does anyone have any experience with this?I ran an Indy as a web server for a while. You can't put three drives in it, but you can put two drives in it. You can also attach external drives. I don't have any experience with putting a second network interface card ("NIC") in the Indy, but I do know that second NICs are available. The Indy performed rather well with Apache. My server didn't get a lot of traffic, but the 150 MHz R5000SC MIPS processor in it didn't have any problems keeping up.An R5k O2 might be a better match - it's got two SCA drive bays ( and an external UW-SCSI port on a separate channel ), onboard fast ethernet and a 64bit PCI slot for a 2nd NIC. I use an ex in mine: ex0 at pci0 dev 3 function 0: 3Com 3c905C-TX 10/100 Ethernet with mngmt (rev. 0x74) ex0: interrupting at crime interrupt 10 bmtphy0 at ex0 phy 24: Broadcom 3c905C internal PHY, rev. 6 bmtphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, autoI would need something that is comparable in performance to an Apple G3blue & white. I am not sure how the mips would compare. Also, I don't know how I could get away without having a 3 drive (for performancereasons), this is one of the issues that I have now. Any suggestions wouldbe great.
Why don't you stick with a mac? Seriously, all the SGI boxes we support right now use SCSI disks, are rather limited regarding drive bays, and they tend to be power hogs. Comparing performance is a difficult issue - I have a 200MHz R5k and a 333MHz beige G3 here. Both have 1MB cache, but the R5K uses a 100MHz bus while the G3 uses 66MHz. In most ways the G3 is quite a bit faster, although the O2 wins in IO-related tasks ( Adaptec UW- SCSI vs. Heathrow IDE - the latter does only PIO4/DMA2 ) and has better onboard ethernet. Also, the O2 can take up to 1GB RAM but it's on proprietary modules. The fastest CPU module you can officially get for an R5k O2 runs at 350MHz, it would probably be roughly in the same ballpark as a G3 at the same clock speed, faster in floatpoint jobs. There are faster O2s with R10k, R12k etc. CPUs but these machines have only one drive bay because the CPU module needs room for active cooling.
Seriously, if you want a web server running NetBSD/non-x86 you're better off with a Sun or a Mac. Or maybe an alpha. Or a PReP box. Either can be quite a bit faster than what we support here, can take more than one CPU ( sparc64 SMP is -current only though ), tend to have more PCI slots ( you may want a SATA card for instance ) and so on. Of course all that would change if we could add support for newer SGI boxes - mostly a problem of getting the right hardware into the right hands.
have fun Michael -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (Darwin) iQEVAwUBSAz1EMpnzkX8Yg2nAQLQZQf/cXB5Q6JXR9DwnDOfYjCJlB05jtcpvF3P kByba0E2XXzOdlck842F5kX2PTTTpqCuZqAysbpii2R1EUMUFDMRw9CpWuIkpXR0 y1SCNa0JRMwKJuICSRC09HjypyN1lyjQJIjwNxMhxDkyQgix3dD+jzicLpKCFhiZ syU9YyD/xa875It+TKxJ4xAThpvUCKUcV70fKTAPDdm5KawqZxYhkXumCcEPqBZ3 INtYDABqbj4VL0pSSLi4UoQg4BnHcEyynxQ4R8yQptck1ex1i+8GPpqA3pPqpyJF W5q64OA3U8wBEs9RmPXLZnq5AEETizT6pHYnPpXq0m+bYgqFFvYUpg== =GteK -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----