[SunHELP] what hardware/architecture do you use for dns and web?

[James]

>    I am in an interesting position in at my new place of employment to
> influence the choice maker(s) in the hardware that will be implemented in
> their transition.  Right now they are running Linux based
> hardware which I
> am not all that happy about....but hey its a job  They like Linux due to
> the its cost effective nature.  I have told them that I believe we can do
> this with similarly priced Sun hardware, which can be had on ebay for
> comparable costs...... but do not know what will be required.
>    What I would like to know is....would something like the Ultra 1 be
> sufficient to run a primary DNS, with a second for secondary or would
> something more be needed.  The DNS will mainly be used for a large
> announcement list...(so, alot of lookups)  Also, what would an Ultra 1
> running apache run like?  Maybe I could get anyone or everyone to post on
> or off list, to reveal what hardware/architecture they are
> running and what
> kind of performance/numbers they are seeing(for both DNS and web).  I
> realize that Ultra 1 are not very high performance but, I figured
> I needed
> to start somewhere since cost is definitely a factor.
>    I would very much like to be administering Solaris boxen at
> work, so any
> help would be greatly appreciated!

Depending on hardware, your linux solution probably does the job very
nicely, so why spend money and time on changing it? Having a desire to play
with Solaris isn't a good business reason to switch platforms. BIND (named)
is the same on both platforms, so the OS has a very minor influence on
performance.

But, since you asked, I used to run 4 public nameservers for an Internet
entity that took up to 800 million hits/day. The 4 servers were configured
the same (redundant). Two were dual 800Mhz Intel boxes with a gig of memory,
and two were Sun T1's ( 1U high rackmount modern UltraSPARC boxes) with a
gig of ram and one CPU. Both ran just fine.

I can tell you from experience though, that DNS on Windows boxen will make
you want to kill yourself.