Ryan Mikulovsky wrote: > Speaking of hard disk issues... I suspect it might be a good idea to have > a few hard disks on hand for our new servers. I don't know what the > market place is like, but it'd really stink if we couldn't find an > appropriate replacement drive several months or years down the road. > They're hardware RAID, right? Can they accept hard drives of a different > model and size but set up to the appropriate geometries using a > partitioner? > The Dell Poweredge has hardware RAID. They are very standard disks so finding a replacement shouldn't be a problem years down the road. Since it is hardware RAID, though, they should be a precise match. Some people even recommend trying to get drives from the same production "batch" as the ones that are currently running, however we absolutely need the same geometry as a minimum. It has a combination of 2 36 gig drives and 4 73 gig drives.
The Sun machine has software RAID and I have no idea what kind of drives it is running. > We should definitely be safe and totally hedge against Murphy's Law. > > I agree that we should do something to protect ourselves against the unforeseen. I think that a first step in this direction might just be trying to save money for hardware repairs and necessary upgrades. Remember that currently the coop does finances month to month and has no money in reserve, so we would have to work out some kind of credit, or other arrangement with individual Coop members to fund repairs or any other unforeseen expense beyond monthly hosting costs. I think that this is really the biggest vulnerability of the coop right now, and a threat to its sustainability. So, in agreeing with your comment about the Coop protecting itself as much as possible against the unpredictable, I think that we should behave like any other cooperative, company or individual by saving some resources for things that happen. I want to write more about this to the hcoop-discuss list later to stimulate some discussion in this area, but anyone on this list can feel free to preempt me if you want to get things moving. I don't see how it would take more than a few seconds for the board to agree to put X dollars each month aside as savings for the Coop, but so far this hasn't been done. Maybe someone on the board can comment here, or on the -discuss forum? I remember talking about this before, but I don't remember any reason for keeping costs so low that we would exclude keeping any money in reserve. Anyway, I'll stop now because I'm out of time and off-topic for the sysadmin list. Maybe any comments on this (now hopelessly off-topic) thread can post to -discuss instead. :) _______________________________________________ HCoop-SysAdmin mailing list [email protected] http://hcoop.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/hcoop-sysadmin
