Debian GNU/Linux at The Gathering 2004
Hi,
This is mainly a mail for those interested -- I'm not really sure if it
should go to -devel or -project or -user or whatever, but here goes :-)
Here at The Gathering 2004 (the world's largest computer party, with over
5000 participants) in Norway we're currently using Debian for all the central
servers in the network. We're basically hosting DHCP using ISC dhcpd3
(something like 500 active subnets, >300kB dhcpd.conf file, with dynamic DNS
against BIND), DNS with BIND 9 (the same amount of subnets, 200kB named.conf
plus a lot of zones), SMTP with Exim 3 (low load at the moment) and some
other services. The load on each of these machines are usually under 0.2, so
they are handling the load quite happily. ISC dhcpd is a bit confusing in how
and when it stores its lease file, so an exact number isn't all that easy to
find, but it looks like we're up to 5495 active DHCP leases as I'm writing
this. :-) (FWIW, the DNS/DHCP configuration will probably be uploaded to
ftp.gathering.org after the party is over, like we did last year.)
Since we're sponsored by Sun, the central boxes (DHCP/primary DNS on the
first machine, SMTP/secondary DNS on the second box) are Sun Netra X1 boxes
-- for those unfamiliar with Sun hardware, these are 400MHz SPARC-based
1U machines. These are running woody, which went in without a hitch (after
the initial netbooting) and in general has been running excellent ever since.
Some other, less important services (like the internal web server, with a
Tomcat-based CMS, or parts of the VLC streaming solution) are running on Sun
LX50 boxes (Pentium 4 1.4GHz) running Debian unstable -- these were installed
in something like 10-15 minutes each with the latest debian-installer beta.
(Once again, Debian's crossplatformness proved to be very useful. :-) )
Other servers are running Mandrake (one streaming machine, mainly because the
person in charge of the streaming was more used to Mandrake than to Debian)
and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (because the WMV-based streaming doesn't
run on Debian). (One of the streaming guys are complaining there are no
packages in Debian of ffmpeg from CVS, BTW :-P)
So, in general: Debian does the job excellently for what we're doing, also in
large-scale, temporary networks. :-)
Pictures from the event are up at http://pr0n.sesse.net/tg04/, in case
anybody wants to see what 5000 PCs look like in the dark :-)
/* Steinar */
--
Homepage: http://www.sesse.net/
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