[YLUG] Server purchase

[Richard G. Clegg]

Robert Hulme wrote:
>> 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.

Previously we've been running the system on an extremely low budget. 
(E.g. reusing previous machines).

> 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.

I'd been told (possibly incorrectly) that software RAID was a big 
performance hit.

> 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.

Well, that's what I thought.  However, our ext3 system was taken down 
and corrupted so badly that it never came back as a result of a power 
failure (actually two spaced one hour apart).  I could have perhaps 
recovered some data from the root partition.  (UPS since purchased).

> What is it you're going to be running on the box that requires high
> availability?

Virtual learning environments for three university departments and the 
maths department web-server.  Essentially it's the usual cabal of 
apache/mysql/php.

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