[YLUG] Server purchase

[Peter Cooper]

On Fri, 2006-05-19 at 11:14 +0100, Richard G. Clegg wrote:
> 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?

In the department (Comp Sci) we build all our own machines, including
the small file servers >~150G, currently we are using Adaptec SATA RAID
controllers, with good results. 
Rack cases we get are from Acme, with triple redundant PSU's, Backup
comes from LTO2 tape drive. the last duel opteron machine we built (2*
Dual CPU + 4G Ram, + 400G Disk, and tape) cost about £4000, so not a bad
price.

> 
> 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.
>