[TriLUG] Department server sonfig suggestions please.

bp bp at itchy.kicks-ass.org
Tue Aug 3 16:19:00 EDT 2004


Some of you may remember questions from me last year about setting up a 
Linux file server.  Well results have been good and we have some new Linux 
fans now.  With that success comes new hardware.  Out is my recycled 
P3-500 and IDE drives and in with a newer Netfinity complete with 2Ghz 
Xeon-HT and 6 15k rpm 36.7GB U320 drives.

Now the question is revisited on how to tune this sucker into a fast 
reliable department server.

Use Plan:  http, smb, and ftp serving of files in the 20mb to 700mb range.  
Some user compiling (java) activities at times too.  File serving is 
really for two directories:
/staging (est. 30-40gb; basic redundancy & off-box backups)
/media (100gb; expendable convenience share, probably lone 120gb IDE drive 
again )

Below is my current quick burn-in config and I have a couple questions 
from it already:

1) Any advantage to the RAID0 swap partition over two disks?  RAID0 
performance boost make up for the S/W overhead of RAID0?

2) How does linux software RAID5 work for dissimilarly size SOFTWARE RAID 
slices? See sdb vs. the rest of / members.

3) Should the OS really run under RAID5?  I can afford a little downtime 
to reinstall an OS; and restore config backups.  I'm just looking for some 
redundancy on home directories and /staging.


Current setup for burn-in:

[sda]
200m /boot
1500m md0-raid0 swap
[sdb]
1500m md0-raid0 swap
32g md1-raid5 /
[sdc]
36g md1-raid5 /
[sdd]
36g md1-raid5 /
[sde]
36g md1-raid5 /
[sdf]
36g md1-raid5 /


How would you guys slice up this box to fill our need?


Thanks.
And yes I know RAID is not backup.
-Barry





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