[SunHELP] SS20 as DNS server

[James Lockwood]

On Tue, 6 Feb 2001 canderso at TTACS.TTU.EDU wrote:

> Hello, I am about to piece together a small office LAN and server farm.
> Total of about 20 workstations and less than 8 servers. Internet access
> via a DS3. We are trying to cut costs wherever possible, but I am
> concenered about some performance issues. Would it be wise to run our
> primary DNS and primary mail server on a SS20/SM71? We don't expect to
> handle more than 1,000 messages per day, though the DNS server will also
> be used as a caching DNS server for the LAN. Would latencies be improved
> much by going to an Ultra 1 or do you feel a SS20 would be more than
> enough machine? Also, what is the recommended version of Solaris for a
> headless SS20? 7? 8? The machine will probably have 128 or more MB ram and
> plenty of disk space.

I personally ran a root DNS name server (for .us) on a SparcStation 10/40
a few years back.  One of the root nameservers for com/net/org (at ISI) 
was a Sun 4/670 the last time I checked, a bit over a year ago.
Admittedly it was a quad HyperSparc setup with a gig of RAM, but it was
also handling many orders of magnitude more traffic than you can
reasonably expect.

DNS is not a huge CPU sink.  A SS20/71 should be dramatic overkill for a
single domain, even with low volume mail queueing factored in.

I would go with Solaris 8 and plenty of memory.

-James