Upgrading to 2.0

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

I wrote:
> I got a running kernel built first try...
> 
> - I have 40 dummy net devices to support running Apache
> - I have 48 PPP devices for dialup access

To answer my own question, not having seen others post a response yet--
I downloaded two items from sunsite which should be of interest to others
who are interested in upgrading to 2.0.0:

  modules-1.3.57
  ppp-2.2.0f

The stock insmod/lsmod programs which come in Slackware 3.0.0 don't work
with the new kernel; and you also need a new pppd to support the loadable
PPP devices.  Running Apache is actually nicer now that I've got a loadable
dummy net driver, because I can add and subtract customers' virtual hosts
without rebooting or having to rebuild the kernel.  (Watch for the
price of a virtual-hosted website to drop to $5/month on the low end...
ugh.  Instead of 4000 competing ISPs, it'll push 20,000 before the shakeout
is done...!)

This is all up and running nicely on a lab-test system.  I'll upgrade the
www.bcs.org server later this week when I've finished digging through the
other system components.

I have placed copies of all these items in the local archive site
ftp://ftp.pn.com/pub/linux directories, and last week we bought a new disk
drive so I could restore the Slackware 3.0.0 archive.  If you see anything
else you want in this archive, please let me know--I'd like to bring it up
to current revs after a long period of neglect.  Also let me know if you
run into problems connecting to the system; we're about ready to make
access a bit broader now that the backbone connections are ramped up to
higher speed.  The ftp.cdrom.com site is now much more accessible than it
used to be (with a 100Mbps backbone link and 512K of ram on the server) but
it still gets beat on heavily.

It is my hope that Linux 2.0.0 will improve system performance so we can keep
running it on our main server indefinitely.  FreeBSD has generally outpaced
Linux on big servers over the past year or so.

Hard drive failures have been plaguing us a lot lately; I'd be interested to
hear creative solutions to this problem on the server.  Currently it's a
single SCSI bus with 6 hard drives on it, totalling about 15Gb.  We aren't
using RAID or any kind of mirroring, and this might be one of the next things
I want to set up.

-rich