I have offered to set up a web server for computer science students here at Western Kentucky University to practice their cgi and perhaps java skills on. The machine would never have to support more than about 5 simultaneous users, and usually would have only one user at a time. The idea is to have a machine that students can bang on without endangering vital files on one of our big servers.
I administer a sun sparc with a few hundred users, and I run linux on my personal machine, but I've never supported multiple users on a linux box. I'm not sure how much load I can handle with linux for a given level of hardware. This is a chance to show what debian linux can do, so I'm excited -- but the hardware I will have will be very marginal at best. Will a 386 work? I might be able to wheedle something a little better, but I'm not sure. I know java grinds down fairly sustantial machines -- would there be any hope of getting java to run at all on a 386? Maybe we can reduce the web resource requirements by running boa instead of apache. Are there any other tricks for marginal hardware I can use that immediately spring to mind? I'd hate to fall on my face because of weak hardware and have people blame linux; it would be better to cancel the whole thing rather than bomb out. How low can the hardware go? steve -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
