We're moving house, so I've got the chance to consolidate a lot of my
hardware, ( wife says not enough space in the new house for my seperate
webserver, fileserver, and Desktop) so I'm being forced to put everything
into one box. Now, I won't be starting a distro flamewar since I've already
decided to use either Debian or Ubuntu on my AMD64 box, maybe OpenSUSE, but
that'll depend on how I decide to set up the rest of my system.
First question. I've got a Zip100 IDE attached drive sitting in my box, not
hooked up to anything.Got a few disks for it, but is it worth keeping? I've
already got a 512 and 1GB USB thumb drive, so portable storage isn't a
problem. If I can pitch it, that frees up a bay that I could shove a HDD
into. I'm thinking car boot sale item, but do yall agree?
Next question.. this one almost started a flame war on my LUG mailing list
that hasn't quite settled down yet. Now, I've got 4 HDDs that I can put into
this box, following sizes
40GB (2 of 'em)
30GB
20GB
and in case you need to know, 70GB external HDD
I listed as my requirements, space to put WinXP so my wife can do PAF and in
case my upcoming course required me to use software that doesn't play nice
with WINE. Not too heavy, but I also want fault-tolerance. I came up with
the following layout, which was missing a few things
20 GB off all 4 drives, RAID5, md1
10GB off remaining 3 drives, RAID5, md2
LVM md1+md2, to divide as I will for Linux install
This left 10 GB free on my 2 40GB drives. I wasn't sure what was the best
next step. I got 2 suggestions from the LUG. Then it descended into a
flamewar of RAID5 vs RAID1 vs only DVD/tape backup vs rsync to remote
server.... completely not what I was after.
Suggestion 1
>If I were you, I would install the system on the 20GB disk, without
>using RAID, and make a RAID5 out of 30GB partitions on the other three
>drives. I would partition your system disk like this:
>hda - / (8GB)
>hdb - swap (2GB)
>hdc - /usr (10GB)
>RAID5 only protects you against a single drive failure. I think the
>best use of the 10GB of free space on one of the two 40GB drives would
be an
>8GB backup partition for / and a live secondary 2GB swap partition,
and
>a 10GB backup /usr partition on the other disk. That way, loss of one
>40GB drive is recoverable by the RAID5 and you have an rsync backup
>protecting your system disk in the event of a failure of the 20GB disk.
Suggestion 2
>Assuming
>hda 20GB
>hdb 30GB
>hdc 40GB
>hdd 40GB
>If you want to maximise your disk space what about
>/ hdb1 8GB
>swap hdb2 2GB
>md1 hda + hdb3 20GB RAID1
>md2 hdc + hdd 40GB RAID1
>combine md1 and md2 into a LVM for /home and /data
>I wouldn't backup /usr. If that dies just reinstall your system. A good
>use for the spare 10GB might be a mirror of your home directories. You
>could use a nightly rsync so that way if you accidentally delete
>something you can recover it (usually you realise the moment you hit
>return that this was silly, so a nightly snapshot is quite useful)
I liked some of the ideas put forth there, but I'd like to pick yalls brains
to see what you'd do in this situation. You'll note, neither left me
anywhere to put Windows. My current thinking is to install Windows in the
first 10GB of my 30GB drive, then doing RAID5 on 20GB from all drives, and
RAID1 for the last 20GB from my 2x40GB drives, install the system into RAID1,
and keep /home and other personal stuff on the RAID5 with a nightly rsync to
my external HDD. If I could afford it, I'd buy all new drives and start from
scratch, but the move is going to take up all our free dosh, so I'm stuck
with a less than ideal situation.
So, any better ideas or more interesting ideas? I'd also like to hear a few
crazy ideas if you've got them.
-Richard
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