Re: Suggestions for a server strategy requested.
- From: The Natural Philosopher <a@xxx>
- Date: Sun, 19 Aug 2007 11:54:35 +0100
Nico wrote:
On 17 Aug, 22:12, The Natural Philosopher <a...@xxx> wrote:
Firstly, will a cheapo integrated Intel motherboard handle 3 disks out
the box`? WE don't want to spend a fortune on SCSI: the speed is not
required, and the expense certainly is not, nor do we want to mess with
USB. Just good old internal IDE stuff. The cheapest board my local
supplier does is this one
<http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/D946GZIS/index.htm>
SATA, or external USB drives. IDE is falling out of manufacture: Do
not expect to see large future drives be PATA (commonly called IE).
Most modern motherboards will handle this without blinking.
Yup. Not having got a quick response here, I did my web research and came up with that as the way to go - 2-4 SATA drives, probably RAID1 which seems to be built in to Debian etch these days...DVD drive only IDE one in the system..
*HOWEVER*. there are serious performance benefits from having sets of
small, cheap drives, and more abilities to recovery from hard drive
failures. It's much cheaper to buy a cheap RAID setup with 4 live 250
Gig drives, one of them hot-swap, and use the available 500 Gig of
disk, than to rely on a single drive which can fail catastrophically.
Yup. I'll have to compare costs between 4x200 drives and 2x400...
Secondly will a basic Debian, plus apache, MySql. php 4 AND 5, and maybe
a compile env fit into under 5Gbyte so we can back up the whole OS disk
apart from /tmp etc, onto a single DVD? I am tempted to restrict /
partition to 5gb so we can in fact DD the partition onto it..so
restamping an OS partition would be a trivial affair if the primary OS
disk gave out. And then use another part of it for /var/log and
swap../var/www however goes on the main data disks..as wil any SQL data
files.
This is trivial, as long as you're not doing exensive compilation or
web site building. Simply don't back up unnecessary log files, and
back p the MySQL as a single compressed text dump snapshot rather than
as the MySQL: files.
As you accumulate software, you may need to use two DVD's
Right. Biggest data areas would be archived scans and drawings: But these are very slow moving. Probably would auto-archive these if they haven't been accessed for 6 months etc. And then do a full archive backup.
But I would highly, highly recommend that you consider an rsnapshot
based backup of your live systems to your spare 400 Gig disk space.
This makes restoration *MUCH* faster. And make sure that spare disk
space is *HARDWARE RAID*, not hardware RAID if you need it.
Right: Haven't a clue what that is but will look into it.
Thirdly there is a requirement to give different users different access
via SAMBA, such that a superuser users 'sees' the whole data disk, but
various machines only see branches of it..rather like if you like
allowing the top monkey to mount /home whereas the other users are
restricted to /home/machine1 etc. Are there any issues with having share
points as subdirs of other share points?
That's straightforward. But if you're running Apache, don't bother. Do
WebDAV over HTTPS, which makes read access easier.
Another thing to look into then..
Fourthly, I need to come up with a backup strategy and a sort of crude
RAID/mirror type thing. I.e. a neat way of (say) finding every file on
the main disk that has been changed in the last week, and copying it to
the backup disk every night..tools? Is this rysnc? or write a script? Or
what?
rsnapshot and Amanda. I'm just finishing a contrct doing this and
other things over at the BBC.
Right.
Fifthly, how do I do a complete, or incremental backup of 400GB onto
DVDS? I would like to think that various partitions could be set up a
DVD size each, but realistically it doesn't look like that is feasible.
Normally DVDs would not be used for e.g. disk failure recovery, but in
the case of a total machine loss (fire etc or theft), we would need to
restore from DVD somehow.
Compressed tarballs of directories and split contents usually works.
Do *NOT* treat 400 GB as a single large mass. Basic segmenting into
user1 data, user2 data, project2 data, etc. is easily supported with a
few symlinks as needed, and can probably split it down to workable
chunks.
Yup. I had come to that conclusion. Is there any sense in partitioning versus simply directories?
Any practical ideas gratefully accepted. I could sit here for a day
googling away, but realistically I am hoping that some or other or all
of this situation has been covered by someone else and they can offer
pointers in the right direction.
My first priory is to spec and purchase the machine and get it
partitioned and an OS installed.
Then develop the requisite scripts and written backup strategies and so on.
Think first, spec second. I'd strongly recommend an external,
inexpensive RAID storage box for this project, for example.
No: I know why you say that, but there is a big space issue and chances of it getting kicked over and cables chewed by pets etc. This is a small startup business with no decent premises yet.
The only dust free location is a living area. That may change in time, but right now it has to be a small unobtrusive box.
.
- References:
- Suggestions for a server strategy requested.
- From: The Natural Philosopher
- Re: Suggestions for a server strategy requested.
- From: Nico
- Suggestions for a server strategy requested.
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