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Always interested in offers/projects/new ideas. Eclectic experience in fields like: numerical computing; Python web; Java enterprise; functional languages; GPGPU; SQL databases; etc. Based in Santiago, Chile; telecommute worldwide. CV; email.

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New Server Configuration

From: "andrew cooke" <andrew@...>

Date: Sun, 22 Mar 2009 15:21:21 -0400 (CLT)

My server (main computer - does everything from firewall to svn to mail to
music streaming) user to contain 6 discs.  4x320GB SATA in RAID 5 and 2x?
SCSI in RAID 1 as /.  The SCSI disks (and controller) were from my
previous machine and about 10 years old.  Unfortunately, the card died at
the end of last week.

It turns out a new card would have cost as much as 2x1TB SATA, and I doubt
the disks will last much longer.  They were also no faster than the SATA
(although SCSI, they were much older).

So I bought 2x1TB SATA instead and set about re-installing everything.

I won't describe how I managed to save data by copying it around, but the
final config is:

2x320GB SATA RAID 0 for /
2x1TB SATA RAID 1 for /home

In addition, I have a removal bay (very simple thing, cost 10 pounds, that
uses the SATA plug directly and so shouldn't be swapped much) that allows
me to swap between the two remaining 320GB drives.  One contains a backup
of the old data, the other contains a backup of the new system (selected
directories only).

Note that the system is on RAID 0.  The extra speed is noticeable (for
example, Eclipse starts much faster),

I also tried using LLVM on top of the RAID 0, but found that I then
couldn't boot the RAID 1.  As far as I can tell that's a bug in opensuse's
partition manager.

For the (nightly) backups, I use a variety of software.  The databases and
svn are dumped using the appropriate tools.  My mail dir is backed up with
rsync.  Most of my other files in /home are backed up with rdiff-backup
(like rsync, but allows you to retrieve specific dates).

Andrew

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