[Gllug] Server setup

[Jan Kokoska]

On Tue, 2004-12-14 at 01:10 +0000, Mike Brodbelt wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-12-13 at 23:05 +0000, Jan Kokoska wrote:
> 
> > http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO-2.html#ss2.3
> 
> That really just repeats the points I made in my earlier post...
> 
> > Because on the above-outlined barricade I stand on the "don't do it"
> > side ;)
> 
> The HOWTO just says don't put swap on md for *performance* reasons, and
> suggests you might want to do it for availability.
> 
> > The above document even has a logical error in "Another reason to use
> > RAID..." while the above paragraph said why one would NOT use it.
> 
> The above paragraph said you would not use it for *performance*. So, if
> you're using RAID 0, then absolutely don't use it - 1 disk failure takes
> you out anyway, so you may as well use the in kernel striped swap. For
> redundancy and resilience though, you absolutely should put swap on an
> md device - I don't think there's really any discussion about this, you
> can't have a redundant system without it.

"There has been a lot of discussion about whether swap was stable on
RAID devices. This is a continuing debate, because it depends highly on
other aspects of the kernel as well. As of this writing, it seems that
swapping on RAID should be perfectly stable, you should however
stress-test the system yourself until you are satisfied with the
stability."

You might haved come to start using it when all seems stable and are
surprised anybody expresses any concern -- I used RAID *before* Ingo's
implementation and know there from time to time there *are* problems.
Industry practise in a not-so-small ISP I worked for, I don't care what
you use in your home system and what has worked for you since summer or
whatever.

Sorry for being impolite, though, it's just that I have people jumping
at me "Xen virtualization solves everything" and "UML is not inefficient
anymore with the latest patches" and "software suspend is stable now"
and hell yea, I test all of the above mentioned and use them on my
personal systems but would not deploy it on massive scale where
supposedly my job depends on it.

Jan / and his 2p worth

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