[oclug] How fast is fast enough

[Charles Sutton]

Hey,

Here is a hot discussion that I have been having with an ISP.  The ISP
is in Ottawa.  A server of theirs is extremely slow.  Especially in the
evening hours.  They have everything running off of one server.  The
discussion I have been having with them is that they could stand to
upgrade the server.  Presently they run a Asus board with PII 350 and
256 megs of RAM(66ms).  The hard drive is IDE 8 gig.  I relayed a
suggestion that someone in the group made about moving the mail server
off onto another box, well, they hit the ceiling.  They said absolutely
no.  They claimed that the task was so surmountable that I should put
that suggestion to rest immediately.  I had also suggested to upgrade
the RAM atleast to 512 and put in a SCSI drive.  They felt it was
unnecessary and would not make much of an improvement.  They claim that
they remotely never see the load on the server as being a problem.  When
I am near the server during the day (occasionally working hard) and
evening it is really working.  Many many customers complain of dropped
connections, the server not verifying username/password consistently and
tremendous line speed drops.

I personally have four customers who have online database needs and I
currently reside them on a friends server in Vancouver.  I would prefer
to work with this ISP but the tech support he pays for appear to have
some limitations (being very kind now).  These guys claim that they host
many databases on other servers just like this one, with no problems
what so ever.  Either these guys are thick in the head or they are
miracle Admins/techs and the rest of the computer industry is barking up
the wrong tree with raid and like solutions.

Can someone confirm or suggest some ideal configurations for a ISP type
server running Unix/Linux type OS.  Maybe I am wrong but I would think
that my suggestions might have been a little on the tame side even.  The
client list of this ISP is around 3000 to 4000 customers, 33.6 and 56K
dialup.  He also has me setting up his wireless.

The biggest problem I have with these techs is their attitude.  How dare
anyone question their professional authority.  Well, I always question.

Thanks in advance for any and all responses,
Charles