Hi, quick question since we have a lot of problems with our servers lately...
We're currently running LFS on a Windows 2003 server. Is this the only way to go? Are all LFS servers running on Windows (or Linux with Wine) ? Or is it also possible to run an LFS host on a command-line Linux version (don't know the right term for that, I just mean the Linux version without GUI I suppose) ?

I would really appreciate hearing what settings problem-free LFS hosters use for their servers!

Thanks in advance, René

AFAIK there is no LFS client that runs on Linux. It always requires an emulator to run such as Wine to work. I've hosted a server on 2k3 server without any probs, 8 slots because of bandwidth limits but it worked well. PC is only a AXP 2100+. I've also had LFS working on a P3 800 with 2k without any problems. I think there's more problems due to bad bandwidth than the actual platform. Normal hosting companies just won't cut it because they're setup for high bandwidth and latency and packetloss don't really matter. For gaming you need a clean connection with no packetloss and low latency. Home connections also suffer the same fate so they can't have too many people on the server.

Yes, its possible to run the dedicated server on linux, under wine only though. There has been various rumblings from a few people about wanting to go on their own and create a linux daemon, but there were a few disagreements.

You don't need a GUI for wine though. I run my test servers under linux on a headless, X-less (no GUI) server.

There's even a whole section dedicated to telling you how to do it in this thread:
http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=9572

Granted, running under wine does give you a little additional overhead, but it's not that much tbh.

Thanks for your input guys, I'm going to discuss the above with our host.

I forgot to mention there is a known, occasional "freezing" problem when running under wine, where it'll crash and not accept any more connections. I don't run my test servers for long enough to know if it's been resolved or not though.

Quote from the_angry_angel :

I forgot to mention there is a known, occasional "freezing" problem when running under wine, where it'll crash and not accept any more connections. I don't run my test servers for long enough to know if it's been resolved or not though.

Hmm, we have had exactly that problem with both wine and Windows 2003 servers... it needs a manual server reboot after that. That's why I really wonder if anyone else has (had) this problem, was hoping someone could point me to a solution.
On our servers it's not - as you call it - occasionally, rather frequently!

To me it seems all of the currently running servers don't have these problems at all, but I might as well be wrong!

Quote from traxxion :

To me it seems all of the currently running servers don't have these problems at all, but I might as well be wrong!

Exactly, two of the [noobs] servers have been running in a headless Debian box with WINE, and they have excellent uptime.

Since patch U30, the dedicated server does not freeze after some days by itself, like it did before that.

traxxion - go for it, it's very easy and stable. Just make sure you use the latest version of dedicated server (e.g patch V).

Hmm then I don't understand why it didn't work on Linux with wine for us. And now Windows has the same problems... starting to think it's something else...
Anyway, we're currently investigating with another host which only runs headless (still not sure if thats the right term, just guessing from what I read above) Linux. Does anyone have a link to that wine version for "headless" Linux?

Thanks very much for your help!