This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
From: Gianni Mariani <gianni@mariani.ws> Subject: Re: [svlug] small business fileserver Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2003 00:22:49 -0700 To: svlug@lists.svlug.org Craig Oda wrote: > First, I would like to thank everyone for giving such useful and > well-thought advice. The Linux community sure is nice. Right now, > I'm leaning toward a RAID configuration and using a detachable USB > drive as the removable off-site storage. I didn't look at Mondo too > closely, but it would appear that Mondo or something like it could do > incremental backups to a detachable disk. > > I've never used a detachable USB drive with Linux. Is this backup > scenario possible? I have Firewire working (IEEE1394) however I had to build a kernel to get it to work (no big deal). USB 1.1 is alot slower than Firewire, however, USB 2.0 is about the same performance as Firewire for HDD. Most recent HDD's can acrually read 30 to 50 MB/sec (if not more), these easily saturate USB 1.1 and get close to saturating USB 2.0 and Firewire. There is a newer Firewire spec that has a 800Mb/sec transfer rate and I would reccomend you look at this. Theoretically you could put 2 drives on that firewire controller and backup from your RAID using a stripe (RAID0) on your backup at twice the speed of a single drive. Firewire enclosures with hardrives are very economical, I've got 2 of them and they work flawlessly with Windows and almost flawlessly with Linux. (If you use Firewire 800 you'll need 800 drives to realize the performance increase). > > BTW, if I need to, I can go above $3K, but since our needs for a file > server are quite limited, I didn't want to waste money if it can be > avoided. Reliability and ease of use are bigger considerations than > cost. I'll pay for convenience up to a certain, undecided, level. I reccomend ECC memory if reliability is so important. (All machines I build have ECC memory and I have far less trouble with them than machines I've used without ECC memory). > > > BTW, about the backup software. I don't necessarily have to use open > source software. I'm willing to pay for commercial software. What features do you need that you're willing to pay for ? > > > The reason I am considering Dell is because they have the onsite > support and next day shipment of spare parts as part of their package. With most computer components you can get next day shipping. > > I looked at Penguin computing, but they only appear to have rack-mount > servers. > > I looked at IBM, but couldn't figure out how to buy a Linux server. > > This is pretty amazing to me since I have a pretty mundane use for a > server. I'm just looking for a common Linux hardware/software stack > that can store our files and back them up. The Windows 2000 server > type of stacks seem to be all over. I could order a Windows system > with a credit card and get it configured for my use within a week. > The problem with that approach is that we know even less about Windows > than we do about Linux. So, I feel more comfortable with a Linux > server. All I need now is to decide on the backup strategy and RAID > configuration and I can buy it. > > Thanks for your help with this. Time for a story: Recently I was helping a a friend with getting his new small buisness office computer. Time was critical so I thought that my usual practice of ordering components and building a machine was out of the question. Hmm. So off to Frys and I bought a $700 HP system with WinXP. Bagged it, took it to the office, spent hours installing all the nonsense. Great! 2 weeks later, DEAD. Intermittent fault in the power supply, back to Frys. Model is discontinued. OK OK. No problem, lets get another off the shelf system. Install software ... you get the picture. 3 days later all kinds of weird things happen. I then go back to plan A. I bought all the components, built a monster machine for $1.2k and it's been running flawlessly for over 2 months (apart from a bug in the PS2 mouse hardware on AMD 762 chipsets which is an easy work-around). The machine runs RH9 and VMWare and even runs 3D games accelerated (added bonus!) with the basic RH9 installation. I have oodles of experience with hardware compared to most people building a machine but I still have alot to learn. However, I have built ALL my machines (except for laptops) and given my recent experience, I think I'll stick to that but you need to know what you're doing. I have had some problems that have needed "debugging". For example, I built 4 machines once with a Tyan S1834 mobo. At the time the specs said it supported ECC memory, the later BIOS's pulled the feature because they just couldn't make it work and guess what, all those machines were flakey and ZILCH help from Tyan. That particular mobo had a VIA chipset. I put together another machine with an AMD CPU and a VIA chipset, talk about nightmare to install all the VIA drivers and not to mention graphics card problems. So I now reccomend no Tyan and no VIA. I have had a huge amount of success with the dual AMD motherboards. These machines are rock solid and perform very well. The recent RH9 machine I talked about is an Athlon 2400 DUAL with an MSI K7D mobo and it runs very well. I need to upgrade my machine in about 6-12 months and I am serious about a dual AMD Opteron as my next choice. If I wanted somthing to last, 64 bit capability is the way to go ! If it's anything like SGI had in '97, being able to run 32 bit and 64 bit executables on the one machine was sweet. Simultaneously testing 64 bit and 32 bit operation was great for developing code. Enough on story. The most critical components for system reliability is the motherboard, ECC memory and power supply. The rest (CPU, Video card, NIC, Soundcard CD, HDD) are *usually* not a stability issue. The problem is that most hardware manufacturers pick these items based on price and not on stability or Linux support. I'm sure your DELL, HPaq or whatever will work just fine as they do for most people. However, if you want to run Linux, there is nothing like picking the components you feel is better to run Linux with. G'nite ! Oh, BTW - make sure you get a Gigabit NIC. The incremental cost compared to the cost of replacing it when you need it - it makes sense to do it now. Even on a 100Mb LAN, a Gig NIC will have better performance because they are designed to deal with 10x throughput and so are more efficient on CPU resources. === From: Jeffrey Siegal <jbs@quiotix.com> Subject: Re: [svlug] small business fileserver Cc: svlug@lists.svlug.org Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2003 03:15:56 -0700 To: Gianni Mariani <gianni@mariani.ws> Gianni Mariani wrote: > Most recent HDD's can acrually read 30 to 50 MB/sec (if not more), these > easily saturate USB 1.1 and get close to saturating USB 2.0 and > Firewire. There is a newer Firewire spec that has a 800Mb/sec transfer > rate and I would reccomend you look at this. Theoretically you could > put 2 drives on that firewire controller and backup from your RAID using > a stripe (RAID0) on your backup at twice the speed of a single drive. Most firewire cards (and motherboards) have more than one port. I'm not sure but I think you get the full bandwidth on each port (system capabilities otherwise permitting). If so, that would be another way to effectively stripe. === Subject: Re: [svlug] small business fileserver Cc: svlug@lists.svlug.org Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2003 09:44:45 -0400 To: Gianni Mariani <gianni@mariani.ws> On Wed, Sep 10, 2003 at 12:22:49AM -0700, Gianni Mariani said: > I have Firewire working (IEEE1394) however I had to build a kernel to > get it to work (no big deal). I've actually seen a lot of instability with firewire drives, resulting in kernel panics. I also found that different chipsets in drive enclosures (since most of the drives are actually IDE) vary greatly in quality and compatability. People would be well advised to make sure that the retailer takes returns (avoid Fry's :-), or better yet, find out if the drive is known to work well before buying. === From: Craig Oda <craigoda@communitybuilders.info> Subject: Backup to USB Hard Drive on Linux [was Re: [svlug] small business Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2003 10:19:58 -0700 To: svlug@lists.svlug.org Thanks to everyone for the information on a small office backup strategy for Linux. I've investigated the hot-plug USB 2.0 drives and found this list on the Internet: http://www.linux-usb.org/usb2.html The BackPack system has hot-plug USB, which seems to be a nice solution. Information is here: http://www.micro-solutions.com/software_library/linux/index3.html http://www.micro-solutions.com/product_info/index.html The Backpack 155015 appears to have an 80GB capacity and sell for less than $199. Cheap cost, so we can buy multiple. Do people think that something like this with Mondo on Red Hat 9 is a good small business fileserver solution? === From: Steve Hindle <steve@itsage.com> Subject: Re: Backup to USB Hard Drive on Linux [was Re: [svlug] small Cc: Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2003 10:39:35 -0700 To: Craig Oda <craigoda@communitybuilders.info>, Hi Craig, I use Mondo for making 'images' to pre-load for customers. It can be quite nice for 'full system' images. I can't say I've tried the incremental backup stuff in it. One thing to watch for - certain versions of Mondo don't work as well as others. I would check the mailing list and look for 'success' stories for the distro. your using (RH 9) and use the same versions of mondo/mindi as listed. RH is a 'supported' platform for Mondo, so you shouldn't have too much trouble. One thing that is real nice about Mondo is the ability to restore to a 'non-identical' machine. For instance, I use it for restoring to systems with Raid 0 root partions, and non-Raid 0. You simply create the partion before restoring (use 'interactive' or 'expert' modes) Makes it very easy to support various hardware configs from a single image. Also, the 'nuke' recovery mode is probably the easiest restore I've seen :-) If you need to 'clone' a machine or do a full restore, simply boot the CD and let it chug :-) Steve ===