Untangle for 1600+ users

[gliverman]

Please, by all means hescominsoon, advise on... I do not pretend to know it all and am not accustomed to building non-desktop machines so I welcome your knowledge. Oh, as a side note, what's a BBU? That is not a term I am familiar with. Thanks!

[juank]

No, you don't need SAS drives for this setup, I'm 100% sure. A sata disk will be more than enough.

AS for ASUS, Untangle may not recognize your NICs and I think you don't want that. You told me you don't use 'vi' so you don't have a lot of experience at the shell command.

I built our Untangle servers on SuperMicro superBarebones, with nice CPUs, Sata Drive and fast memory.

I'll send you the specs tomorrow. The SuperMicro barebone I selected comes in a nice 1U small case for telco racks.

[gliverman]

Thanks for the info juank. In my own defense though, I was introduced to Linux via Gentoo and the default editor in it is nano. That is what all the manuals and guides are written for. Beyond that my Mac's have always had pico... which as you may know is basically the same as using nano (at least for what I have done) so I have never felt the need to learn vi. I know some people swear by it and that is fine... I just have not ever had a reason to use it.

On the hardware side, I was not sure if Untangle would recognize the on-board NIC but figure everything would know the Intel Pro 1000 NIC's I added. I am not attached to Asus particularly, it is just a name that I have heard good things about that had Intel chipsets, onboard Intel video, and 4 DDR2 slots in a micro-ATX form factor.

Thank you for offering those specs, I look forward to seeing them. A 1U case sounds like a great setup and should still be portable like the case I had been looking at.

Thanks again for everyone's input.

[gliverman]

Does anyone see a problem with using this setup?

• Case: Supermicro Barebone SuperServer 5015M-MR+B
• HDD: WD2500JS 250GB Caviar SE SATA 3Gb / s Internal Hard Drive
• RAM: 2 x Kingston KVR667D2E5/2G 2GB PC2-5300 667MHz 240-pin ECC Unbuffered CL5 DDR2 SDRAM DIMM
• CPU: Xeon QC X3220 2.4GHz, 8MB L2 Cache, 1066MHz FSB, 105W, Boxed
• Optical Drive: LG Electronics GSA-T20N Slim DVD Super Multi Drive

[hescominsoon]

Originally Posted by gliverman

Does anyone see a problem with using this setup?

• Case: Supermicro Barebone SuperServer 5015M-MR+B
• HDD: WD2500JS 250GB Caviar SE SATA 3Gb / s Internal Hard Drive
• RAM: 2 x Kingston KVR667D2E5/2G 2GB PC2-5300 667MHz 240-pin ECC Unbuffered CL5 DDR2 SDRAM DIMM
• CPU: Xeon QC X3220 2.4GHz, 8MB L2 Cache, 1066MHz FSB, 105W, Boxed
• Optical Drive: LG Electronics GSA-T20N Slim DVD Super Multi Drive

I have to say..go sas 10k rpm. I two firewall mahcines here that i use for testing. One is a p-4 celey 2.8 ghz machine with 512 megs of ddr2 and a 60 gig sata hard drive. Heavy log analysis(yearly tables) take 3-5 minutes with the hard drive getting hammered and the cpu maxed. My other machine is a p-3 1.266 ghz box with 512 megs of pc-133 and one 74 gig scsi 10k rpm drive.(sas is the updated scsi in a nutshell). the same operation takes half the time. Transferring files from the proxy hard disk is also faster..the sata disk averages @50 megabits/sec and the p-3 box averages 85 megabits/sec. Mind you this isn't untangle but Astaro which is a heavier resource user than untangle.

Trust me you'll see the difference with that many users..go with sas..don't go the cheap way here..you'll get bitten. You are talking about enterprise level userbases here..don't use SMB or desktop drives with it.

[zeusenergy]

Originally Posted by gliverman

What hardware do you all think I would need? This box sits between the firewall and core switch protecting 1600+ users with all the opens source modules except for OpenVPN & Firewall. Routing is installed to make some static routes but does not do DHCP or NAT. We will be logging almost EVERYTHING.

Thanks!

with that many users it will be an enterprise install. I really doubt that the procurement department will complain about paying for enterprise-level equipment. But if your SAU has a tight budget, I suggest using multiple boxes cloned out so that each box will cover each school, rather than one box to cover all of them. You can place all of them in the central location if you like. Maybe have each system installed into rack mount 4u cases, you can get them cheap these days, and install regular ATX stuff inside. Athlon 64's or P4's would do the trick along with 2GB or so per box, and you wouldn't need an expensive SAS storage solution. This will also allow each box to have a separate report, too, for easier per-school administration. And if one box fails, it doesn't take down ALL the schools! That's my $.02!

[gliverman]

I spoke to Supermicro and they said that since I am wanting to use a single hard drive that SAS is a waste of money. They said that without an array that the speed increase would be negligible. I am gonna try and generate a PO this week and will post back once I have more news. Thanks again for everyone's input... keep it coming.

They did say, though, that later I can add a card to the server with an external SAS connecter and then connect it to a case with a SAS array if I need to in the future.

[zeusenergy]

Originally Posted by gliverman

I spoke to Supermicro and they said that since I am wanting to use a single hard drive that SAS is a waste of money. They said that without an array that the speed increase would be negligible. I am gonna try and generate a PO this week and will post back once I have more news. Thanks again for everyone's input... keep it coming.

They did say, though, that later I can add a card to the server with an external SAS connecter and then connect it to a case with a SAS array if I need to in the future.

Let us know how it's going. I'd like to see how a single machine will handle 1600 users. Are you going to use filtering for WWW and protocols only? When you get into spam/virus/etc filtering (gateway security) it will get very loaded and possibly backed up trying to keep pace with that many users. I guess you don't want to split the load on a per-school basis. That would still be the best bet, and each school prolly has a spare PC powerful enough to do the job. Good luck, and yes I do hope it works for you with one system handling the whole load.

[gliverman]

Originally Posted by zeusenergy

Let us know how it's going. I'd like to see how a single machine will handle 1600 users. Are you going to use filtering for WWW and protocols only? When you get into spam/virus/etc filtering (gateway security) it will get very loaded and possibly backed up trying to keep pace with that many users. I guess you don't want to split the load on a per-school basis. That would still be the best bet, and each school prolly has a spare PC powerful enough to do the job. Good luck, and yes I do hope it works for you with one system handling the whole load.

I will let you know how it works. I am building this as a demo box basically and that is why I need it to be able to do it all. If they like it they will most likely put one at each school and then have one that just does some light-weight stuff at the county office.

[hescominsoon]

Originally Posted by gliverman

I spoke to Supermicro and they said that since I am wanting to use a single hard drive that SAS is a waste of money. They said that without an array that the speed increase would be negligible. I am gonna try and generate a PO this week and will post back once I have more news. Thanks again for everyone's input... keep it coming.

They did say, though, that later I can add a card to the server with an external SAS connecter and then connect it to a case with a SAS array if I need to in the future.

honestly? They're stoned. Just look at my post above with 5 users between a SATA and SCSI drive. ignore them..SAS is your best bet..the speed difference will be noticeable..you throw 1k users at a sata drive and your system will go to its knees waiting for the sata drive to dig itself out from under the pile.