[YLUG] Server purchase

[Richard G. Clegg]

I wonder if I could get the advice of the massed ranks of the group for 
two things here.  I'm trying to get a high-availability server going 
within the dept of Mathematics here at York.  We've had lots of 
reliability issues associated with hardware failure recently (three 
downtime incidents in four weeks after a few years of trouble free 
running -- three independent hardware failures).

1) Some kind and lovely person from a different dept is going to buy us 
a shiny new server and I've no real idea what I am looking for.  What I 
want is (I think) hardware RAID, about 150Gb of diskspace and 2Gb of 
main memory.  This must all work with Linux (Debian sarge).  I don't 
need to buy pre-installed, hardware with no OS is better since I would 
just wipe whatever was on.  (due to harware failures I can now reinstall 
Debian in 20minutes and get the system back running in an hour, the 
majority of which is just waiting for copies of stuff to ftp from 
backup).  I've had a brief scout and the hardware RAID I could see 
involved stupidly expensive SCSI disks -- is this unavoidable?

2) The idea at the moment seems to be to have two machines, a main 
machine and a backup and to use a virtual IP address, IP chains and 
heartbeat to get the machines to switch over on failure.  The mysql 
database will be mirrored (we've set that up before) and I guess there 
are other things we might need.  There is also a daily backup to another 
machine at a geographically remote location (in case of fire/theft of 
our main servers).  Does this seem a reasonable set up?  Anything I need 
to think about?

Thanks for any help with these questions, particularly part 2 which is 
(I admit) vague.

Richard.

-- 
Richard G. Clegg,
Networks & NonLinear Dynamics Group,
Dept. of Maths, Uni. of York.
http://www.richardclegg.org/