OT Comments -- Unix documentation / speed question

I've not done anything official, but I do have a fileserver that I've run under all three operating systems at various times. The fileserver is a Pentium II 266 attached to a 45GB RAID. It speaks NFS, Samba, and AppleTalk. I started with Linux. However, Linux fell over when the 45GB RAID got half full; it panicked complaining that "the free list is corrupt". It also did not allow me to create files larger than 2GB. I installed NetBSD because FreeBSD did not support the old piece of junk SCSI controller I was using to get to my tape drives. NetBSD ran very well, but it got swamped when there was a lot of traffic and started losing packets (it would display an error message on the console, which I tracked into the source to verify that the machine was unable to keep up with the traffic arriving over the 100Mb ethernet port; basically, all of the receive buffers on the Ethernet card filled up before NetBSD could drain them). Along the way, I acquired a new SCSI card for the tape drives, which was supported by FreeBSD. However, since the machine was running well under NetBSD I left it under NetBSD for a while. However, NetBSD had a problem with the second tape drive; from time to time, the SCSI bus would hang talking to the second tape drive and I had to reboot the machine to regain the use of my tape drives. I never did a performance test between NetBSD and Linux; however, NetBSD allowed me to entirely fill the RAID with a single 45GB file if I so chose. I switched to FreeBSD when we moved into the new office, primarily to get better performance, but also in the hope that the problem with the tape drive would go away. The performance is noticeably better; the machine has a bit of extra zip that it didn't have under NetBSD. However, it still has the problem with the second tape drive. I've stopped using the tape drive until I get some time to play with it some more; I may wind up going back to the old piece of junk SCSI controller, which is now supported once again by FreeBSD as a quick hack to regain the use of that drive. The primary problems I'm having with FreeBSD, in addition to the second tape drive problem, are that if there is not a tape in the drive and you try to use it, the tape utilities report that the drive is "not configured" rather than that it is offline. That's annoying, and it took me a while to figure out what was going on. The machine also crashes once in awhile. We have a number of Macs attached by 155Mb ATM through a switch running LANE; when they are making heavy use of the server (which is 100Mb ethernet), the server will occasionally crash. Since I don't have a printing console on the thing (anyone know where I can get a new ribbon for an LA100?), I can't see what it prints when it panics; by the time I notice it's crashed, it's already reset itself and is starting to reboot. It's almost enough to make me think about going back to NetBSD. The versions of the various OSes that I've run the server have been: Linux: RedHat 5.2 NetBSD: 1.4, possibly 1.4.1. FreeBSD: currently at 3.4, but with a 3.2 userland (I upgraded the kernel in the hope that it would stop crashing. Nope. I've not had time to consider moving it to 4.0; you can't build a 4.0 kernel with the 3.2 userland, so I would have to take it down and completely reinstall it. I would be tempted to go back to NetBSD rather than try 4.0). Now that I've finally gotten around to sending SCO my $100, I suppose I could try 2.11BSD when I get my 11/84 back in a running state. But A) this is at work, and B) 2.11BSD doesn't speak AppleTalk. At least, not yet. -- Roger Ivie rivie(a)teraglobal.com Not speaking for TeraGlobal Communications Corporation