[HanoiLUG] (Urgent) File server

[Tom Lancaster]

On Thu, 2007-12-27 at 16:45 +0700, Jean Christophe André wrote:
> Huan Truong a écrit :
> > Tom, I doubt that normal PC systems of being able to handle 24/7/365 load on them
> These kind of availability (100% a year) is quite costly to get... You
> will usually find it expressed in terms of 99% (4 days/year), 99.9% (9
> hours/year) or 99.99% (53 min/year).

Any system is as good as its component parts. If you build your own from
pieces you choose you have the chance to get the best of everything; if
you buy a "brand" computer you get what the brand name decides to give
you.

Personally I've had very good luck with 'homemade' computers, but 4 or 5
9's is tough to guarantee, and will require on-call SA's whatever system
you choose.

> 
> > (our company has one PC running as file server for 2 years and it turns out to be unreliable and noisy...).

Noisy? Perhaps the fans are dirty. Stuff gets clogged up very quickly in
Hanoi, and that can lead to poor performance.


> It's funny I've got exactly the opposite so far... Too much trouble with
> branded computers, mainly because of required proprietary drivers to get
> full use of the interesting-and-costly-but-is-that-usefull-really?
> functionalities, and not that much (say: less) with not-branded ones.
> 


> > So I will have a whole 160GB system with Raid-1 (yes, the two disks can fail at the same time..., but we'll have backups every weekend).

If you had a 3rd, larger disk you could run backuppc to do daily
incremental backups with weekly or monthly full backups and avoid the
possibility of losing a week's work.

> Well... Now that's why I'm using not-branded low-cost hardware with
> software RAID (say: using "mdadm" with monitoring) on it!
> 

Ditto. Remember RAID stands for "Redundant Array of INEXPENSIVE Disks" -
they will fail, but there's no reason your main board or anything else
should cause you trouble if you keep your fans dust-free.

YMMV, of course, and if you've got the money, SCSI is nice and the disks
last a lot longer.


Cheers,

Tom