[TriLUG] Fileservers questions.

David A. Cafaro dac at cafaro.net
Thu Jul 3 09:45:30 EDT 2003


Well sounds like you have a decent plan for the hardware you have, but
if you have any cash I would make one recommendation.  Invest in a good
ide raid card and instead of using one 120gb drive, I would buy 4 40gb
drives (or larger if you wish) and put each on a separate channel on
your raid card running in Raid 0.  That will greatly improve your fgrep
searches through large file collections.  And as always as much ram as
you can get (for Linux disk cache..).  Also if you are doing a lot of
NFS or SMB file sharing, maybe using two nics and binding them (so they
act as one but share the load) would be a good idea, and pretty cheap.

Those all involve more hardware, but if you have a little extra cash, I
think those will make your users experience significantly better. 
Otherwise, your plan sounds good for the hardware you have.

-David

On Wed, 2003-07-02 at 22:18, bp wrote:
> My fileserver project has found more hardware now.  I'm hoping the 
> performance guru's can give me a heads up on the best way to set it up.  
> It will be used for two purposes, #1 server huge files (product/middleware 
> installs)  #2 give users access to fgrep * search a large java source 
> tree.  Nothing is that important, not concerned about fault tolerance or 
> loss of data should something melt down.
> 
> The Gear I've collected
> Dell P3-500 tower.
> Primary IDE: 12g & 15g drive
> Secondary IDE: 120g & cdrom
> 3com 10/100 card
> 
> I figure the os will go on the two small drives & I'll create a huge 120g 
> partition to do filesharing.
> 
> So for the two smaller drives I thought I'd a 1g swap partition and then 
> RAID0 for a ~24g / partition.
> 
> Then format the 120g as a single ext2 partition.  Read somewhere that ext2 
> performs faster than the ext3 or other JFS's.  (On UPS, so not too worried 
> about hard resets & fsck time as someone recommended XFS for this reason.)
> 
> Any one have some better idea's?  Remember, I'm trying to get my team 
> hooked on linux.
> 
> -bp 
> 
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-- 
David A. Cafaro <dac(at)cafaro.net>
Sys Admin to User: "You did what?!?"




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