[Dxspider-support] Re: Spider on Services for Unix

[Dirk Koopman]

On Mon, 2005-12-05 at 08:14 +0000, Michael Watterson wrote:
> I have used Linux on and off since 1998, UNIX since 1986.
> 
> But I'm going to try running the DX Cluster SW on an old P90 or similar 
> running NT4.0 and Microsoft "Services for UNIX". It has a choice of two 
> shells and the whole thing runs in 25M RAM!

Let me say straight away that you will need up to 30Mb free RAM to run
DXSpider, it is written in perl and it uses a lot of memory (and it will
require most of it in RAM as a working set as well).

> 
> I can't get any recent Linux running on less than 256M RAM and 500MHz CPU. 
> I have got RH 6.0 but in terms of Linux I'm using the most recent Ubuntu 
> (Debian). I can't afford to dedicate a PC to running Debian/Ubuntu for 
> DXCluster. But I have plenty of old P90, P200 etc type machines with 64M RAM.

Well I have it running on a 200Mhz ARM chip with 128Mb RAM + 20 Gb
laptop drive consuming a little under 3W of power, using Debian. I also
have the main node (GB7DJK) + a webserver running in a Xen type
"virtual" server with 128Mb RAM and 3Gb of data storage for the Node +
webserver (half used) and using about 1.6Gb for the Debian operating
system partition.

> 
> I wave run a TCP/IP over AX.25 Gateway 24x7 unsing NT4.0 Wks, P90 63M RAM 
> and MixW + sound card to Packet radio. A wingate proxy on this connected 
> Packet to a NTTP, HTTP, SMTP, POP3 and FTP servers (not internet connected) 
> on a separate NT4.0 server 200MHz cpu with SW raid 1 & SW RAID 5 over 2 years.
> 
> 
> Do you know anyone else running your Perl scripts on NT4.0?
> 

I don't, but I have cross posted this to the dxspider-support list
(which I see you have just joined). I am sure someone will pipe up if
they have.

What I would say though is: this is written in perl (ie it is
interpreted) and, in general terms, a faster processor is better than a
slower one. However, once the basic RAM requirements are satisfied, you
don't need any more. You then need enough disc to store the spots that
you want to keep.

As an aside, I presume you know the implications of sticking an NT4 box
on the internet and can mitigate the issues?

Dirk
-- 
Dirk Koopman <djk at tobit.co.uk>