[YLUG] Server purchase

[Robert Hulme]

> My plan was to have one RAID machine which failed over to the cheap box
> as an interim measure while the expensive box gets repaired.  I know
> that a cheap homebrew system can run everything we need but hardware
> failures recently and increasing importance on the system mean that we
> need a better system in case of failures.
To be honest with the cost of hardware nowadays versus just the cost
of downtime and maintenance in bringing a downed box back up I would
never not use RAID on a server.

You can afterall just do RAID1 using two disks... and as you only
wanted what 160GB, it's going to be really inexpensive to do that in
software as a minimum.

If you use software RAID (which works very well in Linux) it is a good
idea to have UPS in case of power failure as you won't have the
battery backing on the RAID card. Still - as long as you're using a
reasonably safe file system (like ext3, i.e. NOT reiser) a power
failure is unlikely to cause any major problems.

What is it you're going to be running on the box that requires high
availability?
-- 
------------------------------------------------------
"98.5% of DNA is considered to be junk DNA with no known purpose.
Maybe it's XML tags." -- Anon

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by
definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Kernighan

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