On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 03:19:01PM -0400, Douglas A. Tutty wrote: > > > Well, debian has different requirements re licensing of modules. Your > > > guess may be wrong if HP has provided a propriatary module for the > > > kernel that e.g. suse has included in its kernel but debian can't > > > include. For some things (e.g. the nVidia driver), you can still get an > > > install done and add a module later; for the boot drive that becomes a > > > bit of a problem :)
I understand what a boot drive is now. But I still do not understand why 'for the boot drive that becomes a bit of a problem'. particularly I don't understand what 'that' refers to. Does that mean I will fail to install lenny on it or adding module on boot drive is more of a problem? > For extra redundancy, you may want to experiment and try installing a > system onto a 6 GB partition on one of the drives. I bet you'll find it > more than big enough. You could then reinstall, but put a 6 GB (or 10 or > 12, whatever) partition at the beginning of each drive, in a raid1 > fashion. In this way, if any drive fails, you'll still be able to boot > the system. This is another piece of great advice. I will take it. > Will they be backing-up at once or one-at-a-time? > > If one-at-a-time, then unless those servers are using raid striping, the > throughput of the servers' hard disk will be similar to the throughput > of the backup server's hard disk. However, if all three boxes will be > spitting data to the backup server as fast as their hard drive (and > network) can move the data, then the backup server will need to be of > higher performance if it to avoid being a bottleneck. I have not not come up with any details(such as this) for the backup. But considering what you have said, I will do the back up one at a time. Since two servers I will backup is certain to be faster than the backup server. > Another is that the raid cards have their own cache. If you don't have > a UPS, then you'll want to set up the cache so that they don't tell the > OS that the data is on disk until it really is on disk (not just in its > cache), unless you get a raid card with a battery backup for its cache. Thanks for this kind reminder. I will definetely use UPS. > > I will only use raid 1, that is because this is simple and effective as > > it appears. > > However, re performance (above), if you have three boxes streaming data > to the backup server, you may want raid10 (which you can do with > software raid) or raid 50, or raid60 (which can handle multiple drive > failures). Its always a trade-off. It seems I need to figure out which raid to use. I am not locked to raid 1. But simplicity is always welcomed. > 1. Backup the data, somewhere on the same box (optional) That is what we are doing, but I think it is not good enough, so we are buying a dedicated server. > 3. Copy the data from the backup server to some remote location > either with removable media or a second backup server at a > remote location. A lot of this depends on the size of the > backup set and your options of remote location. I keep a backup > in the bank's safety deposit box. safety deposit box? are you serious:) so how to vent the heat? I will put the backup machine in a different building. Thank you very much Doug. I really need to do more homework on it. Regards, -- Zhengquan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org