[KLUG Members] Server recommendations?

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> < major snip />
> > I've talked to is very positive; and I work with PowerPC (but not 
> > Apple)
> > every day.  My only question there would be "Why the XServe?".  If your
> > willing to bite the PowerPC bullet, and your going to run Linux and not
> > OS/X, then pSeries offers more flexibility and per-buck-bang than
> > Apple's server line (no surprise, the pSeries and iSeries machines are
> > the servers of choice for every grunt-work-I/O-intensive application
> > I've encountered).  And for moving bits to-and-fro they'll kick the
> > livin' snot out of your stock-Intel(ish) server.
> > But there is always the looming question: is your app available for the
> > PPC architecture?  And in reality it AIN'T as easy as a recompile, as
> > Mono PPC users have learned.   But for "standard" apps like OpenLDAP or
> > Samba, sure.  When I retire my current primary file server (xSeries),
> > the replacement will most likely be a pSeries.  It won't be an XServe
> > because I want to be on the OS used at 95%+ of Samba installations.
> True. Does the pSeries use the same PPC 970/970FX/975 chips?

I believe that is true for at least the lower end models;  once you move up into
something like a 600 series, your talking PPC but an entirely different kind of
animal, and I don't know what chips they use (but they DO run Linux);  those
guys even have logical partitioning down to the level of CPU resources, and
they breathe fire.

> also, if I'm not mistaken, can't you tune linux to be faster for 
> specific things more than you can with BSD?

This is a rather tough thing to say with confidence either way.  I think as far
as tunability goes I can do more inside Windows regedit to improve performance
than I can with sysctl on Linux,  but then, Windows performance really sucks,
so what is it worth? (and usually I don't even bother, on M$ that is.)   I've
played with BSD (regular BSD, not Apple's BSD) and the word "primitive" comes
to mind;  again I stay with Linux primarily just because applications support
it, and most application (we are talking Samba, OpenLDAP, Heimdal, CUPS,
etc...) use it to actually  develope.  Using something like BSD introduces too
much port and patch lag time; on Linux most things are rpm -Uvh ... the day
after the fix comes out.