[CentOS] Central file server advice please

[John Bowden]

On Friday 21 September 2007 16:39:46 Von Landfried wrote:
> My one piece of advice, coming from experience, is to buy a hardware
> RAID card from a reputable manufacturer, i.e. 3ware, Adaptec, LSI. I
> personally recommend 3ware, and have 10+ in various servers here in
> the office. The $200-$600 dollars you will spend will be well worth
> it if something ever should happen. You can swap out cards, and the
> raid array will be recognized, you can swap out drives on the fly,
> and they all support the newer RAID 6 for even better redundancy (I
> like RAID10, but I am paranoid). 3ware has amazing utilities for
> monitoring the array, either via the linux CLI, or via a secure web
> interface (nice when you use SSH port forwarding). It will send you
> an email when any errors occur (configurable detail levels) so this
> helps provide peace of mind. I can't stress how important a dedicated
> hardware RAID card is, regardless of the brand.
>
> Just my .02
>
> On Sep 21, 2007, at 11:06 AM, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
> > On Thu, 20 Sep 2007 at 10:58pm, John Bowden wrote
> >
> >> I have a Gygabyte GA-7N400 PRO2 with a 2.6 mHz Athlon cpu. I want
> >> to set up a
> >> central file storage for 2/3 users using 6/7 machines. A mixture
> >> of win2k, XP
> >> and various Linux distros (my home network). It will be used to
> >> store files,
> >> (docs, music and DVD ) for all of these machines, print server, (two
> >> ink-jets), mail server and later on  a myth tv set up. Would SAMBA
> >> be the
> >> best option for the file and print serving ?
> >
> > Samba for file serving, CUPS for print serving -- both Win2K and XP
> > can handle IPP.
> >
> >> The mother board has 2 X IDE channels, 2 X IDE channels with raid
> >> and 2 X SATA
> >> raid channels, that's up to 10 hard drive devices. The IDE raid
> >> chip is a
> >> GigaRaid IT8212F chipset. It supports raid 0 or raid 1 and raid 0
> >> + 1 and
> >> JBOD. The SATA raid is a Silicon Image Sil3512. It supports Raid 0
> >> or 1.
> >> Would I get better speed performance using the chips to manage the
> >> raid or
> >> using software raid?
> >
> > Without digging out the specs of those cards, I'd lean heavily
> > towards software RAID, mainly for ease of management and
> > compatibility.
> >
> > --
> > Joshua Baker-LePain
> > QB3 Shared Cluster Sysadmin
> > UCSF
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A bit out of my price range for a home file server, but I will keep an eye out 
at the computer fair I attend.

-- 
Guy Fawkes, the only man to enter the house's of Parliament
with honest intentions, (he was going to blow them up!)
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