On Wed, Apr 21, 2004 at 05:49:43PM +0530, arunkurse wrote:
> I am Arun , working as system administrator . I  need to clarify
> certain doubts regarding gnats version 4.0 .
> 
> 1.  Is it possible to install gants4.0 on solaris 8???

I don't see why not.

> 2.  If possible what should be the mininum patch level on solaris 8??

Define "minimum patch level".

> 3.   How much space does it consume for installation and configuration 
>     of database ???

The programs are relatively small, especially if you compile them
dynamically linked.  The size of the database will be proportionate to
the number of reports you expect to receive.  Each problem report is
stored in a separate file on the filesystem in plain-text.  The format
of each report is a modified RFC822 Internet message, and is fully
compliant with that standard.  These PR's are not compressed, but can be
archived and aged.

Currently, we have just over 3000 problem reports in our database
directory.  All of these were received over email, and MIME attachments
were not removed (so a significant portion of the space used is a result
of spam and viruses).  The space consumption is currently around 21MB.
This could probably be reduced by at least one third if we
re-categoriezed many of the "pending" PR's to "spam" and removed them:

5.9M    pending
3.4M    spam
1.8M    email
1.6M    pc-sw
1.3M    server
1.3M    mac-sw
1.1M    gnats-adm
772K    website
736K    general
496K    pc-hw
488K    network
392K    windows
348K    macintosh
248K    mac-hw
228K    printer
192K    novell
124K    lists
108K    mmaker
68K     biosci
40K     projects
32K     web-cgi
16K     security
16K     gnats
8.0K    glycine
4.0K    gnats-queue
4.0K    mcb-xserve
108K    test

Taking a quick cursory glance over the vast majority of problem reports,
space consumption falls around the 4k mark, the typical block size for
most filesystems.  Space would be recovered here on a filesystem like
reiserfs, which specializes in storing many small files.

Some quick math would reveal that for every 1000 Problem Reports, on
average you should be consuming 4000 blocks or 4000KB of space.

Additional space savings could be realized through MIME
filtering/conversions of submitted emails through procmail filters.  We
already block emails larger than 50KB in size.  Some emails are sent
with both plain-text and HTML attachments, and some are HTML-only.

Our procmail filter is attached to give you some ideas on how to handle
such things.

-- 
Chad Walstrom <chewie@wookimus.net>           http://www.wookimus.net/
           assert(expired(knowledge)); /* core dump */