Cen Tos wrote:
On 3/31/07, John R Pierce <pierce@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
thats a desktop motherboard, not really what I'd consider 'server'
grade. Now, if this is just a SOHO 'server', that may not matter, but
if this is going into a colocation site to host production websites, I'd
want a 1U or 2U server with niceties like hotswap hard drives, redundant
power supplies, and ECC memory, perhaps one of the Tyan or SuperMicro
servers.
This is going into a 4U chassis with redundant PSU and hotswap :) The
remaining hardware is largely constrained by budget. But of course, if
anybody has a better suggestion for a reasonably priced board from Asus or
Gigabyte that has two NIC, supports Core 2 Duo and ECC with onboard
graphics, I'm all game :)
Tyan & SuperMicro are out because it would take the local reseller like a
week or two to get the board, I don't want to know what will happen if the
board dies. It's far safer and cheaper for me to keep a spare desktop board
from Asus/Gigabyte. I have close to zero confidence in Abit boards, little
confidence in product quality and after sales support of other brands
distributors in my local area. If this wasn't for a server, I would pick an
MSI board for cheap pricing and excellent local support.
On another issue, I feel that generic 1P servers are more defined by the
redundancy features than the board itself. Raid, Hotswap drives and
redundant power supplies are more crucial than the board. I've clients who
ran lan gaming shops and I supplied them easily thousands of systems over
the past few years. Although they don't run 24/7 like servers, the 12~16
hours or so they are in operation tend to see much more intensive usage
compared to what I'm expecting on this setup. Relatively few boards have
died compared to numerous fans, drives and power supplies.
Hence even if I can get the budget for it, I'd rather spend it on a standby
system, and do this HA heartbeat thing I've been reading up, than spend it
on an expensive board from Tyan/SuperMicro.
I recently read a Goot Trick, might even have been on this list. Bloke
has software raid configured involving two internal drives and one
firewire (I expect USB 2 would do as well).
He attaches drive, syncs the RAID, removes it. Takes it away for offsite
backup.
I already new of some of the ideas here:
http://lcic.org/ha.html
and my preference is DRBD, but I'd have to redo the research. There's
also enbd, which requires a kernel patch, but then my research there's
pretty old too. nbd is in the standard kernel source.
--
Cheers
John
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