I just gotta brag a little I just finished setting up a 486 as lfs because I was fed up with RH's bull. I set up dhcpd, xinetd, smbd, and raidtools on the thing. Some of those are hard to find all the source code necessary to install! Anyway, it's up and running!! Anybody interested in learning how everything works, setting up an LFS machine can be very informative!

Now to stress test this baby.. I set it up because RH crashed alot under a heavy samba upload. If I can still crash it, I don't know what I'll do.. I guess I'll say "screw linux" and go with BSD!!!

I've read this somewhere else, and I'll leave it as a warning to anyone who doesn't already know:

"Redhat likes to live on the bleeding edge. It leaves the bleeding up to the users, though."

Give some feedback, please.
Since you dissed RedHat, tell us more about this LFS...
And, please, as this forum is read by newbies,
explain a little.
(For my benefit, as well.)
What kind of server operation are you running..
General scope, etc., without divulging any private info,
of course.

If anyone is gonna chat about LFS, might want to redirect you to the LFS forum in the Distribution Forum...

Thanks,

-trickykid

Sure thing, I'll post feedback after I get a little use out of this machine. So far I've already run into some problems. Tar and Bzip and some other progs started seg faulting just a min ago. I'll post some over in the lfs discussion after while. samba is still giving me trouble too, but the thing hasn't crashed on me... maybe the version of glibc I got was buggy, I don't know.

Just a question. Did you crosscompile it on a faster machine? Or did you compile everything on the 486?

I compiled a complete LFS system on a 486. I first tried crosscompiling it on a faster machine but read that there are problems when you crosscompile when using an optimized LFS distribution. I didn't feel like installing another base distribution to do the cross compiling so I just wrote scripts to compile each package on the 486 and left it for a few days. It took almost 24 hours to just compile glibc. But it works nice and fast now though.

I compiled everything on the 486. It's the only machine that has linux (Previously RH). I used the RH distro already on it to set up the lfs on a new partition. That glibc did take some time for me too I've been working on getting this install running for two weeks or more. I didn't write any script to do the entire thing.. I should have, though. That was a good idea. I'm recompiling/installing samba now. I've had problems with samba on this machine with RH and now in LFS too! There must be something I'm missing. I'm thinking that maybe the machine is so slow that the connection times out, or something. I'm going to try to make it cache writes. Although the machine has no free mem when running, the cached writes will still write to swap space. The swap space might be faster then the actual destination as the actual destinantion is a software RAID 1 array. I'm also thinking that the writes are very slow because the machine does not support DMA modes for the hard disks. I tried getting a new controller before, but the controller was too new to work well with the 486... sigh.

Maybe there's a way to increase the timeout timings in samba.. That might require tinkering with the Win98 client though...

I use a 486 as a server too. It's got a 6.5 gig harddrive in it but it is also really slow because it doesn't support DMA. I wouldn't even dare using it as a file server though. I just don't think the machine would handle it. A file server kinda depends on fast disk access which you really won't get with such slow disk speeds. And on your machine you've combined all that with a software RAID 1. The poor machine is choking to try to keep up and eventually gives up I guess. I think you'd be better off to get a cheap pentium so you could at least use the controller card to speed up harddisk access.

I finally got the thing to work!! It was the NIC card the whole time. I haven't tested it much, but i just switched the NIC card in the thing and it runs flawlessly. I got the idea after finding that many ppl with my NIC are having similar troubles. Yes, the machine is slow, but it is fast enough for me. Besides, my network is currently limited to 10baseT because of my hub. The machine is fast enough to stream audio and video files which is its main purpose. Also, I might make it an internet gateway too, but it will use a dial-up so the badwidth is extremely small. The box may someday be a pentium, but not soon. Maybe if I ever get DSL.

This machine now seems stable under redhat (I test with redhat so if it crashes and kills the / filesystem, I didn't hurt my LFS) so I'll be using LFS now and maybe writing a little. A howto for telnet would be nice for LFS, and a howto for RPM because all of the stuff that redhat maintains has the tgz source file stuck in an srpm.