Ruslan Sivak wrote:
>> I like to keep things simple-minded and not fight with anadconda.
>> During the install, put /boot, swap, and / on your first 2 drives as
>> RAID1. After that works the way you want, build whatever layout you
>> want with the rest of your space and either move your /home contents
>> and mount point over or mount it somewhere else. A nice feature of
>> this approach is that you can upgrade to pretty much any other
>> version/distro by building a new set of system disks and swapping
>> them in, keeping your data intact. I also like to use disks in
>> swappable carriers and to keep a spare chassis around. That way you
>> can use it for testing things and developing your next version but if
>> your production motherboard fails you can just move the drives to it
>> and keep going.
>>
> I have 4 500GB drives. Seems kind of a waste to put just /boot swap and
> / on the first 2 drives.
I typically use 36 Gig scsi's for the system. You can use that or even
less for the first 3 partitions where you install, then add a 4th
partition on the same pair of drives.
>> If you can deal with the space constraints of partitions that match
>> single disk sizes by mounting them in appropriate places it's hard to
>> beat RAID1. If everything fries except one drive you can still
>> recover the data that was on it - plus it gives you natural boundaries
>> for backups which you shouldn't ignore just because you have raid.
>>
> Unfortunately this is my backup server, and also file server. While I
> may move the file server part out to another box in the future, for now
> it's going to be serving two roles. I would like to be able to depend
> on it.
You are living very dangereously there. RAID can protect you from one
of the more likely failures, but nowhere near all of them - and some
will kill all the data in the box in one step.
> In the future I might set up a backup of this server to be on Amazon's
> S3. Is there a linux program that interfaces with it?
> Russ
I'd toss two of the drives in some desktop linux box and run backuppc on
it - and get an external drive to periodically make an offsite copy. If
your data compresses well you could use drives about half the size for
backuppc.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com