Fedora Users — Re: Fedora on servers

Ow Mun Heng wrote

Okay.. I'm confused. are those 4 in 1 boards really NICs or are they
juts built in switches for routing? The shop did say that they had one
of those and since it was basically a switch, I didn't want it.

Sorry for replying late - moved my mom-in-law to Florida and just now started looking at my email.

Those were plain old NICs, 4 of them on a single board. With software, it was possible to aggregate them to pool their bandwidth to a single IP address. Again, that was back in the days when 100mbps was a big deal and getting 400mbps was fantastic. Add a switch and get duplex for 800mbps - WOW.

This is what i look for.
1. NIC
2. Sound card (don't really care for a server but most of it's built in
anyway)
3. Graphics (usually runs headless anyway)
4. USB (they're built in anyway, but I'm sure there's a way to turn it
off via the BIOS)
5. SATA. Now, this is a MUST.

Most of the above will have a high chance to run via shared interrupts.
So.. what choices am I left with??

For a server, we turn off the serial & parallel ports (except for 1 serial on the box that might have the control function for UPS monitoring), all USB ports, sound, and we could care less about sata on board - actually we don't want it. We use 3WARE controllers for true hardware RAID via sata and they're bullet proof. We can't afford to use those junk builtin SATA controllers for RAID. Using the built in SATA for non RAID is OK, and we do use them for that, but we're talking servers, and servers always get hardware RAID, which means they always get it via a 3WARE controller. We also don't do software RAID simply because we believe that hardware RAID is superior, and for the price its a business decision that's never let us down.

With built in graphics, we always set the buffer size to 32k via the BIOS, BEFORE we install the O/S. We don't expect fabulous graphics performance via a builtin adapter, but on a server its just fine.

I've never used a AMD before but am willing to try since it's a _big_
difference in price. And for a normal Desktop/Server usage, I don't
think it's such a big deal.
  

There's absolutely nothing wrong with AMD for a server or workstation. We've done lots of them. When the P4 first came out, we went with AMD to avoid the problems in the new architecture. That gave us first hand experience with AMD as a rock solid alternative.

That's the thing, at the shops I can find NICs going for USD5 for a
Dlink or some other brand and I see 3com selling theirs for like USD25!

I usually think, what's the deal.. a NIC's A NIC! Maybe my requirements
aren't that excessive.

If you need real performance then your best bet is to test a few different NICs on your LAN. There are sometimes huge differences in thru put depending on the NIC used.
As with most things, the LAN is a collection of parts, and having the highest performance NIC may actually hurt performance because your improperly installed cabling can't handle it, or your crappy switch chokes on the traffic, etc. If you want performance, you have to have everything in the chain up to the job.
Shoving a jet engine into a KIA doesn't turn it into a race car, and neither does shoving a high performance NIC into a box automatically mean things will run faster. The KIA might blow up, and so may your network.

BTW - There are "server" NICs that can boost performance above what even a good regular NIC can accomplish. We don't have any clients where their bottleneck is LAN bandwidth, so we haven't used any "server" NICs in years.

Bill Gradwohl