[KLUG Members] alternate redundancy v. cost

[Dirk H Bartley]

On Sun, 2004-08-01 at 08:38, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> > All businesses seem to be obsessed with redundancy.  Most admins usually

> > I know there are methods/projects to get network filesystems to
> > synchronize but have not tried them.  
> 
> THEY ALL SUCK!

That's good to know ahead of time.

> > All services performed by
> > these servers could be configured to be manually switched over to the
> > other at a moments notice.
> 
> True.  But the manually part sucks, that will need to happen while your on
> vacation.

Damnable vacations anyways, who needs 'em.

> 
> > I guess I am just asking for opinions.  I would tend to lean against it
> > but the idea sounds intriguing to me.  Money is always a factor
> > unfortunately.  The cost of the commodity stuff is just so low relative
> > to the scsi and server mem stuff.
> 
> It depends.  I run non-storage intensive service (intranet, dns, dhcp, smtp
> relay, etc...) on small "cheap" hosts,  I have I think 7 IBM x300s.  Then for
> storage intensive apps like file serving, IMAP, & database - ALWAYS BUY A REAL
> BOX.
> 
> But that doesn't mean you can't "cheat".  I have an IBM x300 with two 120G IDE
> drives I use for file serving - becauase there is fileserving, and there is
> fileserving.  Lots of time people just want crap available on the network and
> it is 90% read-only, or huge transaction files that are process and discard.  I
> create those shares on the poopy little IBM x300,  while real data volumes and
> home directories live over on the netfinity 5000 on hot-swap SCSI RAID.  With
> DFS people don't even need to know they wandered from one server to the other.
> 
> And there is a thought - that netfinity 5000 is *OLD*.  I've looked at them on
> e-bay for $200-$300 dollars;  I'd buy another one in a heart beat, the thing is
> a data serving gorilla, and CPU and such doesn't really matter for something
> like Samba - two 500MHz PIIIs can handled HUNDREDS of clients and never break a
> sweat; especially in one of these tweaked out beasts.  Used netfinity hardware
> is abundant and excellent.
> 
> Other apps like LDAP, DNS, etc... are naturally distributed - an x300 here, an
> x300 there, another one over yonder.  Need more performance?  Add more cheap
> servers.

Good information.  Thank You for the info.

Dirk