DNS by MicroVAX (was Re: UNIX V7)

On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 12:09 PM, Andrew Burton<aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote: We ran primary and secondary DNS from a pair of Microvaxen at McMurdo in the 1990s with no load issues. They served up mcmurdo.gov for all comers, on and off the Ice (McMurdo has a 24/7 connection to the 'net via a relay station on Black Island). I think they retired those servers as part of the Y2K effort, not because they weren't going to work, but because they had a pile of money to modernize everything (like replacing the aged 64MB 486-based Novell servers that fed hundreds of 386SX/16s, etc). It was fun going down the Ice in the mid-1990s as a PC technician and finding out that there were VAXen at McMurdo and the Pole. I even got to help out with the occasional issue (like making a 'phone patch' (HF radio<->land-based PBX) to talk the Computer Technician at Pole through a SCSI disk replacement. I can't give you exact numbers, but I don't see a performance issue with using MicroVAXen as DNS servers in a moderately busy environment. If you only had a T1 or smaller to the outside world, there's only so many requests per second that can fit along with the data going to previous questors. I don't know if I could make the same endorsement if you had an OC3 and the traffic to fill it - that would end up being a lot of DNS requests. As for "why replace it", I'd say power consumption, possibly skillset (if I were the only one in the company who could keep it running), and maybe hardware maintenance concerns (especially if it was an RQDX3+RD-drive system, not a SCSI system). -ethan