The Servers We Use
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We settled on custom-assembled PCs, using components that we find to be very reliable, and which enjoy widespread driver support. Our standard system consists of: ASUS P3B or CUV4X Pentium III motherboards, 384 MB RAM, Adaptec SCSI3 controller, IBM SCSI3 hard drives in a dual-fan removable hard drive chassis, ATI AGP Rage Pro 3D display card, Intel EtherExpress 10/100, all housed in an Antec 4U rackmount case. Final cost: about $2000 per PC.
Operating Systems Used at Lyris for Networking Applications
Solaris 7, 8 for Intel for email list hosting:
- Low-cost PC hardware
- Reliable and high-performance multi-threading
- Very, very stable
- Reasonably good overall OS performance
Windows 2000 for SQL-based email list hosting:
- Fairly good stability
- Reliable and high performance multi-threading
- With VNC, fairly easy to remotely administer
- When using MS SQL server as a data store, reliability is much improved
over using NT file system (a client OS crash no longer corrupts data, and
live backups are possible, both of which are not possible with the NTFS file
system)
Red Hat Linux and Solaris 7, 8 Intel for application server:
- UNIX better than Windows for application servers due to stability,
easy application crash recovery, and scripting
- When an application is available on all UNIX variants, we tend to
use Solaris, due to stability. For example, very high DNS load crashes the
Linux (Red Hat 6.1 or 2.2.12-20) kernel, but DNS has been very stable on Solaris.
- Some applications have a better feature set on Linux than on other
UNIX-style operating systems, so in those cases we use Red Hat Linux.<>
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