On Thursday, February 03, 2011 01:38:35 pm Chuck Munro wrote: > On 02/03/2011 09:00 AM, Lamar Owen wrote: > > But my personal box is a used SuperMicro dual Xeon I got at the depth of the recession in December 2009 > Less than $500 for a Supermicro box? Holy crap, Batman! Hey, first let me thank you for trimming the rest of the digest out in your reply; that's good stuff. Next, this is an older Supermicro board, P4DP6, and older 32-bit-only Xeon's, 2.8GHz. But it has 4GB of ECC RAM, and the nice 2U Supermicro rack chassis with the six bay trayless drive array. And, again, the total package, except for the drives, which I already had on hand, was less than $500, and that included the 3ware controller and the SiI SATA-2 low profile 64-bit PCI-X board. > I took Les' advice and built a connection map of the 15 drives. The > Disk Utility GUI turned out to be useful once I determined the SATA > breakout cable order and labelled each with its PHY number. Knowing > that lets me use the GUI to clearly identify a failed drive, which shows > up as a PHY#. I'm normally a command-line kinda guy but this utility is > something I really like on RHEL-6. I hope it's the same on CentOS-6. Should be. As far as I know this is the same palimpsest that's in Fedora; not sure of which version is in EL6, though. It does pretty good, even gives you a benchmarking utility, partitioning, formatting, SMART utilities, etc, all in one place. It works reasonably well over an ssh X tunnel, too, and is one reason my standard install now includes at least the X libraries, even on a server. There are other reasons to have a remote GUI on a server, even if you disable the display/desktop manager and GUI login. I use ssh tunneled konqueror a lot, for instance. When you need to do large batches, CLI works best, but for just drilling down into filesystems I do like konqueror, from either KDE3 or KDE4, doesn't really matter that much to me. And it's reasonably fast even over DSL. And my main server management station runs ssh tunneled gkrellm instances from critical servers; it's easy to tell at a glance if something has happened to a server, and it makes for a pretty display in the datacenter during tours, too.