On Monday 24 March 2008 15:32:14 Ray Leventhal wrote:

Hi all,

One of our servers (very old) died last week and I'm setting up a new CentOS 5.1 box to replace it. Primarily used as a samba fileshare on a mostly windows-workstation network.

This system will, ideally, have the OS on a 146 GB SCSI drive, with user data on a 300GB SCSI, both attached to the backplane of the 4600.

My question is this:

What's best practice and most desirable partitioning for doing this, and how would I go about setting up mirrors of both the OS and the user data drives?

Thanks in advance for any help on what I know is a rather newbie question....please chalk it up to lack of sleep and veritable hounding by the 'higher ups' :)

Don't know about best practice, but here are my thoughts. Is the system drive likely to change much? I'd be inclined to do a partimage and only re-do that when significant changes have happened. Yes, on restoring it you would need to run updates, but that's a fairly quick way of getting back into the game.

For the user data, remember that if you mirror, you also mirror mistakes. Accidentally lost data on the original becomes lost data on the mirror. Instead, I'd recommend some system based on full backup, say monthly, and differential backups daily. Several applications can handle that.

Anne