At Mon, 5 Oct 2009 15:34:38 -0700 (PDT) CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
On Mon, 5 Oct 2009, nate wrote:
ML wrote:
HI All,
How fast does a a small DNS Server need to be? I will have about 10 servers and a few workstations. I have a few older Compaq PIII boxes with 1gb RAM each or I have faster P4 boxes.
Your watch is probably sufficient.
Or your phone...
It wasn't THAT long ago that "monster" servers ran 85MHz SPARC 4d's. (We had a cool 12-proc unit that auto-failed one cpu so I could say with a straight face that I administered the only 11-processor web server I knew...)
Seriously, you'd have to look long and hard to find a computer that didn't have the horsepower to host DNS, DHCP, NTP and static HTTP services.
The bigger issue is ensuring that an older computer has enough disk space to house a modern distro and enough RAM to run modern kernels -- and even then you can tighten things up if you're willing to work with a speciality distro.
Right. You'll *have* to get at least a socket-7 motherboard with a K6 processor and DIMM RAM sockets and PCI bus, if only because getting old-school SIMMs is hard these days. And getting a distro with install kernels (much less stock kernels) for less than a 586 is getting hard, unless you opt for something like Slackware or Linux From Scratch. In practice any still working minimually i686 system with a reasonable amount of RAM (for just a DNS server, 256meg RAM and a 20-40 GIG IDE disk, would probably even be enough to install, say, CentOS). I recently installed CentOS 5.2 on a old Dell box (PII or PIII vintage) with an 18gig disk. No X11. Just DNS, DHCPD, PPPD, Samba, CUPS, and little else. This little box is just being used as a dialup 'router'. It is jacked into a wireless 'router', but the wireless router is just being used as an accesspoint and Ethernet switch (this is a home setup -- broadband is not presently available, only dialup internet).