RE: [cobalt-users] Be gentle with us

["John Burgess" <john.burgess@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Ash,

Can't say I know what your mp3 problems are,  I know I had some a while back
when I started my Tucows music mirror, but I'm running some CGI scripts that
do the download of the mp3's etc (to keep the browsers save/run dialog from
popping up), and I believe they were related to not having the right perl
mods installed.  If I remember the details I'll forward them.

As far as running your own small news service, you can get started small and
run a low bandwidth news server on most any Linux distribution that includes
innd.  Can't say that this will work on Cobalt for sure, but you should be
able to get it going on a Cobalt/X86 platorm.  If your backbone provider can
feed you only the groups you want, (i.e. alt*, comp*. etc.  there is a lot
of wasted bandwidth with a full feed that you don't really need just
starting out), then you need to do a couple more things to make sure you
limit your exposure cause they will pump it to you using as much bandwidth
as you let them.  On your border router, you should be able to use CAR
(Committed Access Rate, a Cisco acronym) or something similar that most
router manufacturers have in their router O/S for limiting bandwidth and
prioritizing bandwidth according to traffic type, host IP, incoming/outgoing
etc.  Within the innd configuration, by experimentation and according to the
amount of available disk space on your news server, you can fine tune how
long articles are kept before they are expired.  Additionally, you can just
refuse to accept certain high bandwith, low signal news groups, such as
those that include entire ISO distributions of CD's to save on space.  This
type of tuning will require some significant attention be paid to the news
server for the first couple of weeks, while you are learning innd and tuning
but will result in a small news service that is reliable and maintenance
free running within the resource contstraints that you have.  Of course
full-feed news servers will be running large SCSI disk-arrays, have at least
a full-T1 dedicated to the feed, but you can certainly get your feet wet
with fractional T1 bandwith, and a couple of large IDE drives by carefully
managing bandwidth and disk space.

Additionally, because you are running music sites (music sites are typically
high bandwidth because of their large files) you may want to use something
like the Perl module mod_bandwidth to limit your web server bandwidth usage
to avoid saturating your Internet pipe.  In my experience, If you getting
into daily hits of 5 to 6 figures, DSL and Cable modem users _will_ use all
available bandwidth to the detriment of all and limiting the available
bandwith will make your sites Internet performance more consistent and
predictable.  How do you know what settings you need for that various types
of traffic and servers? This is determined by trial and error
experimentation and monitoring initally.  A bandwidth monitoring tool like
MRTG (free) and Cisco NetFlow can help eliminate some of the guess work.

John Burgess
www.fastex.net

-----Original Message-----
From: cobalt-users-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:cobalt-users-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Ash
Sent: Wednesday, March 15, 2000 7:51 PM
To: cobalt-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [cobalt-users] Be gentle with us




Hi All,

We've been leasing a RAQ2 for a while now, and managed to figure out
most of what we need to, but we still have a few problems that the
company who lease it to us either won't, or can't, help us to fix.

i hope that this is the right place to get some advice, and that if you
do give some, could you keep it as simple as possible...? Thanks :-)

Well, assuming it is, this is two of the problems we can't work out (and
the cobalt knowledgebase doesn't appear to cover);

The first is mp3 and real audio files. We can upload the mp3's/ra's to
the server no problem. If we telnet into it, the files show up as being
there. However, when a link on a webpage points to a file, it comes up
with a File Not Found error.

The strange thing is you can type in the url of the directory (with no
index page), and naturally it brings up a listing of all the files
contained within, but even when clicking on them it still comes back
with the File Not Found. ?

It's quite a major problem for us as we mostly host music websites. Not
good.

The second question is not so much of a problem but an enquiry. We would
like to be able to offer our clients access to newsgroups, but none of
us are really sure how to go about setting up such a service.
Is it just software we need to install, do we need to register with
major-domo, and would having newsgroups available on our server create
enormous bandwidth (and take up lots of space) and slow all the websites
we have hosted down considerably?

i've seen someone mention Dnews software, but after looking into it i
don't think it's really what we want as it seems to be a kind of 'proxy'
newsserver.

If anyone can help that'd be great. If no-one can, then it looks like
it's more hours reading complicated books in the library again.....

Many Thanks,
Ash



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