On Sun, 26 Sep 2004 03:06 pm, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 26, 2004, Shlomi Fish wrote about "Proposal: Making for a Plea
for Donations for Upgrading eskimo's Hardware":
> > Hi good people!
> >
> > As you may well know, the eskimo.iglu.org.il server at the moment suffers
> > from lack of disk space.
>
> Shlomi, thanks for letting us know.
>
> If you want the Hamakor board to make a more informed decision, it would be
> nice that you - and the other administrators - could give us some more
> information on what's really bothering us - including some actual
> statistics. Instead of "we need 100 more GB" say "We can't fit Redhat 17
> into the disk". Instead of saying "beak is old" say something about its
> slowness and the load level typically seen on the machine, etc.
>
OK, first of all, eskimo.iglu.org.il and beak.hamakor.org.il are two
completely different servers. They reside in the same place (Actcom), but are
administered by different teams, and serve different purposes. iglu.org.il is
the older of the two, it's a Pentium III machine (500 MHz or more - can't
remember), and we use it to host www.iglu.org.il, www.hackers.org.il,
jlc.iglu.org.il, and other domains. It is also a Web/FTP server for various
mirrors. It was originally donated by HP and Ligad. beak.hamakor.org.il is a
newer P4 machine with a bigger RAID array. (200GB+, IIRC). AFAIR it was
donated by IBM.
As for statistics:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ df
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda6 5619520 1898384 3721136 34% /
/dev/sdb1 6717600 3158096 3218260 50% /iglu
/dev/md0 70004400 38491712 31512688 55% /storage
We also have other partitions, but they took part in the older configuration
and may still contain important data. Having a bigger /sd{a,b} will allow us
to simply copy all of them to a nice directory there for propsperity. we can
also do it in /storage. Our /etc/fstab reads:
<<<
/dev/sda6 / reiserfs defaults 0 0
/dev/sda7 none swap sw 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/fd0 /floppy auto user,noauto 0 0
/dev/cdrom /cdrom iso9660 ro,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/sdb5 /mnt/oldhome ext2 noauto 0 0
/dev/sda5 /mnt/oldvar ext2 noauto 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/oldboot ext2 noauto 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /iglu ext3 defaults 0 0
/dev/md0 /storage ext3 defaults 0 0
>>>
Nadav, if you'd like an account on iglu.org.il, I can gladly set one up for
you and give you the root password. I can send you a message encrypted with
your key with all the information.
> Note that Hamakor also has its own money, and funding a server is certainly
> in our charter if we happen not to get donations and there's a need for
> an upgrade. In fact, collecting money to be used for the community was
> exactly Hamakor's original purpose.
>
Right.
> By the way, is "beak" and "eskimo" the same machine? If not, could perhaps
> some of the load (or disk usage) from eskimo be transferred to beak to
> eliviate the disk issue, even if temporarily?
>
beak has too many mirrors anyhow. In any case, the philosophies behind the
management of beak and eskimo are different. In eskimo, we give accounts
relatively liberally, we install all the software we need, (even if it had a
relatively poor security record) and we don't do chroot games. It is also
(IMHO at least) more of a community server than beak.
So, what I'm saying is that we need to make sure eskimo is also a capable
server.
> > The RAID array is about 70 GB in total, while the normal
> > general-use hard-disk is about 10 GB in total. (a lot of which is full)
> > Both of these sizes are not adequate.
> >
> > While we have been happy with the functioning of the server (except for a
> > faulty RAID disk which has since been replaced), we really do need more
> > space if we want to better serve the needs of the community with more
> > mirrors and more services. We need at least 200 GB of RAID space,
> > possibly more. And we could really use a bigger general purpose disk.
>
> A few months ago, when stalker (iguide.co.il, ivrix.org.il, harel.org.il)
> broke down, we bought two 80 GB IDE disks for less than 1,000 shekels.
> That's 160 GB for 1,000 shekels. Now it probably costs even less.
> That's easily within Hamakor's budget to fund.
>
> Can you remind me again why we need extremely-expensive SCSI / RAID disks
> for mirrors, which can always be rebuilt in a time of crisis even if we
> never do any backups? (see more on that issue below)
>
Well, I'm not sure eskimo even have an IDE connectors. And generally, the
Linux kernel is rumoured to misbehave (or at least used to misbehave) in
mixed IDE/SCSI environments. But if you'd like to buy an entirely new
IDE-based server (with very large IDE disks - we need more than 160 GB) I'll
be pretty happy to ditch the current machine hosting eskimo, and switch to
it.
Note that SCSI is known to be more reliable than IDE, but I'm not an hardware
expert. Just contact iglu-web regarding the prices so we can debate on the
proper space/cost compromise.
> > Upgrading eskimo (or completely replacing it with some other machine) is
> > in order. However, the original sponsors of the server, Compaq and Ligad
> > have so far relieved their own responsibility from financing the upgrade.
> > What I'd like to do instead is make a _public_ plea for sponsorship of
> > the upgrade. I.e: publicize it in Linux-IL, Whatsup, www.iglu.org.il, the
> > Israeli Media, etc. This money will go to Hamakor, who in turn will use
> > it to pay Ligad/Compaq for the upgrade.
>
> This can work, but Hamakor can also fund small upgrades from the money it
> already collected.
>
Right. Nevertheless, I'm a bit tired of keeping this between the circles of
the IGLU-web mailing list and would like to put it in the open. (without
accusing anyone, of course - just requesting donations).
> > A note is in order: eskimo.iglu.org.il is based on Ultra-Wide SCSI
> > hardware, which is quite expensive. At the moment, we are using RAID 0
> > for our RAID array, which is used for hosting the mirrors.
>
> Is it impossible to actually put IDE disks in eskimo?
It has no physical space left. And like I said, I don't think it even has IDE
connectors.
> Is it impossible
> to add an IDE controller if one is missing? If you don't know how to do
> it, maybe we should ask for a volunteer from the community who can go and
> look at the hardware and give an opinion on whether or not it is hopeless?
>
I think it would be easier to buy a new IDE-based machine, than to try to
convert the current eskimo machine into an IDE configuration. Either we buy
new UW-SCSI disks for eskimo or we get a new machine (IDE or whatever).
Trying to IDEize eskimo is A Bad Idea<tm>.
> P.S.
> I'm getting a feeling of deja-vu. Let's resolve this issue once and for
> all...
Right. +1.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
--
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Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Homepage: http://shlomif.il.eu.org/
Knuth is not God! It took him two days to build the Roman Empire.
