This is what we do at Sandia. We have one machine which serves
cpu/auth/file, but the actual Venti disks are in a Coraid connected
via GigE. The fossil disk is in the server, but if it dies we can just
build a new one.
Which reminds me of an often overlooked but important point:
Save your fossil vac scores on another machine!
Without them, your seperate venti server is JBOD :-P Well, not quite. You
can eventually find the right vac score, but you have to manually mount
each and every score in the venti until you find the right one. See
/sys/src/cmd/venti/words/dumpvacroots. You could probably semi-automate
the process by writing a script that mounted each of the scores in turn,
checking the mtime of something like /sys/log/timesync in each, and
sorting the vac scores accordingly.
On my setup I aux/clog the fileserver console to a u9fs mounted directory
on a UNIX server. You could also cobble something up that scans the fossil
console for vac scores and emails them to an offsite address.
--lyndon
