We need to assemble and put into service a couple of large machines to act as a web cache (using the squid software).

The choice is either SUN systems running slowaris or large PC's running either NetBSD or FreeBSD. The management are inclined to the former, but may be willing to entertain the latter if I can convince them it will work, hence need I need a bit of feedback from people who run PC's with large amounts of memory and SCSI disk.

My first stab at a system would use a Pentium II board with 512Mb Memory and a 333Mhz processor. The system would boot from the on-board EIDE controller via a 2Gb system disk. The cache area would be two strings of 4 fast wide 9Gb SCSI II disks plugged into an Adaptek 3940 ultra controller. We would probably use an Intel Express 10/100 Ethernet adaptor (or two) as the network connection.

Although I have used NetBSD & FreeBSD for a while, its mainly on small systems with pathetically small disks !

Questions:

1) Ideally I would like the 9Gb disks to have a single large filesystem + some swap. However I think the max size of a filesystem is limited to 2Gb - Is this still true ?

[I cannot find any reference to this in the man pages or FAQ's - though off_t seems to be 64 bits which implies > 2Gb files]

2) Will 512Mb of memory break anything ? (I know I will have to tell the kernel the true memory size)

3) Has anyone any experience of a machine with this sort of configuration ?

4) Has anyone used any of the Supermicro boards e.g. P6DBS with the builtin Adaptec Dual Channel UWSCSI ? or got suggestions for other suitable motherboards (preferably ones with will take up to 1Gb RAM) I should point out that 'the management' would REALLY like to use a commercially available box rather than me build one out of bits !

Cheer, Dave

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