Hi folks, sorry for the way OT post but hopefully the brainpower here will help. I run a server on the net, used by a fair number of people for shell, mail, web, dns etc etc etc. On sunday part of my IDE raid config blew up and even though the raid recovered, the filesystem was hooped, so I lost /var, and then last night (tuesday) the reliable scsi disk holding /home that's been working perfectly blew up with odd errors (still hoping it can be recovered, but not holding my breath).
Anyway, in light of this I'm wondering two things. "Why is my hardware karma so bloody bad?" and "how can I make it so my sunday is never spent in the data-center again?" What do people recommend for hardware, hard drive in particular (have a server class MB and dual P3s, ECC ram, good SCSI card (though no raid) in there now)? Right now the OS (debian, moving to gentoo when I have the chance) takes about 20G or so, with /home about 40. Things I'm thinking about: - hardware raid or software - should raid be set up on a disk or partition basis. Right now I have 4x40G IDE drives (3 in sw raid5 one spare) partitioned each with 4 partitions (500/500/20/19). The first is / and each night / is rsynced to each of the other three drives as a backup, the second is swap, the third is part of the first raid array (/usr) and the forth part of the second raid array (/var). This was set up when I was first learning about raid, so it is probably not optimal. I'd almost think that having one partition each (or two one for swap) would be less hassle, but I've had my butt saved a couple of times by errors on one partition of one drive only affecting (and nuking) one raid array instead of both. - partition setup - raid for everything, including / or just for /home, /var, /usr and the like - backups/mirroring? Right now I backup selected important dirs (/var/lib/mysql, /etc, etc) via rdiff-backup to two remote servers and locally, which saved my butt on sunday. Should I have a spare drive to mirror all of /home onto as well? - RAID1 or RAID5 or rsync? The current server specs are: - 2xp3-1.13ghz - 2G ecc serer ram - 4x 40G IDE for /, /usr, /var, swap (off the shelf maxtors and WDs, probably the cause of a lot of my problems) - 1x 36G 15k SCSI cheeta or baracuda drive, no problems until last night for /home - 400-450w power supply - *lots* of fans :) Many thanks. alan -- Alan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - http://arcterex.net -------------------------------------------------------------------- "There are only 3 real sports: bull-fighting, car racing and mountain climbing. All the others are mere games." -- Hemingway -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
