[luau] computer set-up advice

[Yuser]

On 17 Apr 2002 at 3:31, beesond001 at hawaii.rr.com wrote:

> That way, your file server is behind the firewall, is 
> fairly well protected, and is running on a relatively fast box that 
> probably has a much faster I/O speed than the P200.  

A P200 can do them all with little effort but like beesond001 stated, it is easier or safer or simply just provide piece of mind to configure a second box to run as the router.  
You can make a router as simple as a floppy only (no HD, keyboard, or monitor) on a 486/8mb ram from a pre-built distribution like Freesco (www.freesco.org) or the LRP 
(www.linuxrouter.org) or you could get a full machine and put a distribution on it.
For Samba..I have a P200/128MB with a few large 5400rpm IDE drives acting as a Samba server and I can transfer roughly 4.5MB/sec between it and the Windows 
machines.  During this transfer, load on the Linux machine is minimal, although the much more powerful 10K rpm SCSI disk Win machines are at 100% CPU.   Just for 
reference.. I have a second Linux machine with Samba that is a P100/64MB ram with one really old 1.6GB SCSI.  I get roughly 3MB/sec with that one.  It has Squid 
running and configured to take most of the resources so I imagine that slows it down somewhat.  Memory and disk I/O effect a file server more then CPU speed.  Bottom 
line I guess is that a P200 would be adequate if that's what you have.