Red Hat Linux 7 Unleashed

Red Hat Linux 7 Unleashed

By William Ball

INN Hardware and Software Requirements

INN doesn't impose too many hardware requirements; most Linux-capable hardware is sufficient to run INN. If you do download a lot of newsgroup postings, however, slow processors will be affected. Because INN often works in the background, your foreground tasks get slower while INN crunches away in the background. This is usually not a problem with 80486 or better CPUs running Red Hat Linux.

There are no extra RAM requirements for INN, although the more RAM, the better, to avoid swapping. If you download only a dozen newsgroups a day, Linux needs no extra RAM. You should have swap space allocated on your system as a RAM overflow, but there is no need to expand swap space just for INN unless the existing swap space is very small (less than half your physical RAM, for example).

Disk space may be a problem if you don't have a lot to spare. Downloading newsgroups can eat up disk space at an alarming rate, even if you download only a few groups a day. Because newsgroup postings are not automatically deleted after you read them, the effect is cumulative. This is especially a problem with newsgroups that contain binary information such as compiled programs or pictures. A typical newsgroup download can range from a few kilobytes to several gigabytes. Some of the binary newsgroups get many gigabytes daily, all of which accumulate over a week or so to huge amounts of disk space. It is not unusual for a day's complete download of all the newsgroups to take up several hundred gigabytes of disk space, so you must be careful about which newsgroups you choose to download.

Modems are another issue, and the speed of your modem directly impacts how many newsgroups you can download in a reasonable amount of time. Obviously, the faster your modem, the better. A 56Kbps modem will download much more data in a minute than a 9,600bps modem. That doesn't mean you need to junk your existing slower modems and replace them. The determining factor for your connection is the amount of data you will be transferring. If you download less than a dozen non-binary newsgroups a day, a 9,600bps modem is just fine. When you start downloading megabytes of data a day, as often happens with binary-laden newsgroups, you need a much faster connection to keep the download time to a minimum. Any of today's 56Kbps modems will suit your purposes for typical Usenet downloads of a few dozen non-binary newsgroups. When you start downloading large amounts of news, you should look at faster connections such as ISDN (128Kbps), T1 (1.544Mbps), or T3 (45Mbps). Cable modems and ADSL can usually download at a speed between that of ISDN and a T1 connection. However, be aware that disk and CPU requirements go up with the more groups downloaded and the more readers using your news server. Also remember that some companies will charge bandwidth fees for many higher-speed options.

Software requirements for INN are simple: You need INN and a configured connection to a newsfeed source (such as UUCP or TCP/IP to an ISP). INN is supplied with Red Hat Linux, and you can also obtain it from most Linux FTP and Web sites.

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