[nos-bbs] My response - JNOS not being a race car, having stress problems.

[Jay Nugent]

Greetings,

On Wed, 30 May 2007, Maiko Langelaar (ve4klm) wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I personally do not want everyone on this list to be distracted or scared
> away from using JNOS to it's full potential, just because of a few recent
> observations and comments, which if misread, will leave new and potential
> NOS users with a not so great impression of what it is truly capable of.

   Agreed!

 
> > domain.txt has the characteristic of (self?) destruction from unknown
> > causes at this time. It is likely a program instability ...
> 
> Why is it "likely" a program instability ? This stuff has been running
> for YEARS, and hardly changed over that time. It's more or less proven
> to work way before I even got involved in it.

   I have seen domain.txt corrupted but ONCE since I first started running 
it back in 1992.  ONE hosed record in 15 years is certainly not 
"unstable".

 
> > This is a suggestion to NOT try to get the "last ounce" of performance
> > from jnos installation because jnos is not a race car.
> 
> I don't think that's fair, and anyone reading this (new JNOS users in
> particular) are not going to get the best impression from reading this.
> 
> You may be surprised to learn that JNOS is indeed a race car, BUT like
> all vehicles, if you load it down too much, it slows down. I'm sure if
> one has a kick ass machine, that will definitely help things out.

   Ran my first JNOS box on a 386 40MHz with only ONE meg of RAM.  That
was Hamgate.Merit.EDU and the machine had 4 radio ports plus a very busy
ethernet port.  It pushed MOST of the Internet mailing lists such as
NOS-BBS, various lists from TAPR, Kep tables, and the usual load of
bulletins and personnal email for Hams living in Eastern Michigan from
Port Huron down to Toledo, Ohio.  Daily logs showed well in excess of 500
messages per day, some SMTP and some heirarchical mail being passed to
conventional BBS's.  I'd say it was chugging along quite well, race car or
not!


> I've run JNOS (in DOS) as a router that had uptimes of over a month, I
> know of people that have had uptimes of over half a year. No application
> servers running of course, just packet switching more or less.

hamgate.wayne49.ampr.org
KA8E-4    Dearborn    (44.102.49.1)  :  29.4 ms   194256  236:04:34:13
eocway.ampr.org
WA8EOC    EOCWAY      (44.102.48.88) :  6910.2 ms 227104  201:10:48:44
bbs.n8kuf.ampr.org
N8KUF-4   Monroe      (44.102.56.33) :  5735.7 ms 66784   104:19:55:03

   So hows that for uptimes!  236 days, 201 days, and 104 days.  The 
latter two are located at remote sites and managed over RF.

 
> > It is my opinion that jnos has an internal processing logic problem that
> > manifests itself only under "stress".

   Well if the old Hamgate.Merit.EDU box wasn't under "stress", I don't
know what is.  My suspicion is that disk errors are more likely due to RF
getting into the box, or a weak power supply.  But JNOS itself is and has
been incredibly stable :-)


      --- Jay Nugent  WB8TKL

"Getting rid of terrorism is like getting rid of dandruff.  It cannot
 be done completely no matter how hard you try." -- Gore Vidal
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