[Techtalk] Beyond personal -> large scale Linux usage

[Scott]

On Sun, 2002-08-11 at 21:42, Nicole Zimmerman wrote:
> As for your situation, we'd probably need more info to know what your
> clients' boxes are doing (just webservers? other internet-type servers?),
> what level of familiartity you have with linux, etc. :o)

My familiarity with Linux is:  I have been using it since 1998 (Red Hat
5) and come from a BSD environment.  I can get the boxes up and running
in about an hour.  I know where to look for files to configure it
without a GUI.  So, I would like to think I am pretty good with it.

The situation is calling for pretty much all ISP services.  One box will
be a dedicated web server housing about 200 - 250 web sites.  The next
box I will build is for mail and radius.  The third box only has primary
DNS planned for it.

We have Portmaster racks for the dial up, replacing them with Pattons. 
I have a single 2000 box for those wanting to do hard core ASP and Front
Page stuff, about 20 sites sit on that box.

Currently the web server is up and running with Mandrake 8.2 with
Apache/PHP/MySQL.  It has been pretty fast, but a few things bother me:
1)I can not get it to compile programs, you have to add a bunch of
libraries after install.
2)Some of the hourly cron jobs have not been running and no mention in
the log files as to why.
3)There are very long pauses when connecting to it for POP3 or FTP, up
to one minute.  Once connected it is fine, but I have even been talking
with a Mandrake engineer trying to figure out the problem and he can't
seem to figure it out either.

I had Red Hat on it, but was not happy with the performance, compared to
Mandrake which blew it out of the water on web page serving.  Tried
Debian, could not get the raid controller to work after spending a day
on it.  

Thanks in advance to everyone for helping me with this.

-Scott