I usually mount not only /vicepxx but also /usr/afs & /usr/vice on the raid drives, that way a motherboard upgrade requires swapping the controller & drives.
A consistent problem is raid driver upgrades which for the low end controllers never happen. On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 6:46 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Shouri, > > I've used shadow volumes in the past. Thankfully I never had to test > bringing an entire shadow server into production. I also plan to use it in > the near future (barring contrary advice from the list) for a server which > houses dozens of TBs of research data for a project which can suffer some > downtime (as long as it's unavoidable) but not as much downtime as would be > needed to restore dozens of ~1TB volumes. > > I'll leave the topic open though, and would welcome comments on shadow > volumes from any of the devs. > > Regarding rsync, depending on the size of your partitions, its performance > may make you cry. I use an rsync-based backup application for my non-AFS > data and am starting to surpass the limits of what rsync can do in a > reasonable amount of time and RAM on current hardware. > > However the main reason I'm replying is your comment about RAID. IMO, > anytime you're configuring a mission-critical system without RAID you're > probably asking for future headaches. I think the only time I'd consider it > is if the system had no unique data on it and could be made part of a HA > cluster using [heartbeat, etc]. But at that point you're just abstracting > your redundancy at a different level. > > All of my database and fileservers currently use hardware raid (3ware or > LSI/PERC). But one of my "idle time" projects -- a bit of an inside joke > since I have no idle time -- is to play around with ZFS on linux to see if > I feel it's ready for prime time yet or not. > > PS. I noticed "Associate Professor" in your signature. Have you consulted > with your local IT support? If they're not overworked, they may have > additional advice specific to your site, discipline, etc. > > Cheers, > Stephen > > On Sun, 25 Aug 2013, Shouri Chatterjee wrote: > > >> Dear All, >> >> I wanted to ask about "vos shadow" and whether it is being used as a >> solution on production systems to back-up user home directories. >> >> The most significant information I can find is a thread from this email >> archive last year. http://lists.openafs.org/** >> pipermail/openafs-info/2012-**December/039077.html<http://lists.openafs.org/pipermail/openafs-info/2012-December/039077.html> >> >> I can dedicate a server to host only shadow volumes. If an active server >> fails and dies, the shadow copy can be brought online. Is this a better >> solution than, say: >> (1) keeping a periodically rsync'd copy of the /vicepx partitions on a >> shadow server >> (2) afs over drbd >> >> I am trying to use commodity hardware (no RAID, no scope for software >> RAID either) to build cheap AFS storage. >> >> Shouri >> >> ____________ >> >> Shouri Chatterjee >> Associate Professor >> Department of Electrical Engineering >> IIT Delhi, Hauz Khas >> New Delhi 110016 >> India >> >> Phone: +91 11 2659 1099 (O) >> +91 11 2659 1619 (R) >> >> >> ______________________________**_________________ >> OpenAFS-info mailing list >> [email protected] >> https://lists.openafs.org/**mailman/listinfo/openafs-info<https://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/openafs-info> >> >> ______________________________**_________________ > OpenAFS-info mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.openafs.org/**mailman/listinfo/openafs-info<https://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/openafs-info> >
