On Sat, 19 Feb 2005, berk walker wrote: > Do you want a glass or some cheese? Not really... I just thought I'd pass on my experiences and thank those who gave me support recently. By posting my configurations and thoughts and issues I've encountered during the way, I'm essentially opening myself up for a peer review if you like. I'm not saying my way is the best way, but it's one way. If others can learn from it, great. If they want to criticise it, thats also good, but it's only good if it's constructive. But a glass of Old Peculiar would go down nicely, thanks :) > Actually, I am thinking that your main problem is a generic [almost] > BIOS issue, as no one in "right mind" would expect your configuration. Expect my configuration ... what? To work? Why not? It's a motherboard with 4 PCI-X slots and a single 32-bit PCI slot. Why shouldn't it work? Or do you mean expect my configuration to exist at all as you think it's utterly preposterous? Right now it's working well, and it's about to be installed at the clients site where it'll run and be thrashed for a week at least before we put live data on it. Even then, we'll keep the old server (which it's replacing) going for a month or so until we're finally happy with it. I'm sure there is a BIOS or motherboard/chipset problem though and Tyan have some sorting out to do. I have emailled them with all my issues and concerns, but not had anything back yet. > Might I suggest a somewhat more expensive, yet safer work-around? Feel free... > Split your drives between more boxes and gigabite link them. If you > work this well, you will have increased the survival of disk/other > failures - stick 'em in the mail room, or where-ever. The server that this box is replacing has 12 disks. (Which I built some years back) This has 8. It has 12x the disk capacity and cost less than 1/3 the old server did. It has redundant PSUs bought from a company that has been supplying server cases for over 10 years. It'll be installed in an air-conditioned machine room with dual 16KVA UPSs... Why should this server with multiple disks pose a problem? I've built many servers with multiple disks, and they all work well, after-all, thats what this mailing list is about - Linux with multiple disks! I've had to work round buggy motherboards in the past (Dual Athlon boards) and in that respect, this is not much different. I did at one point have 2 (server) motherboards which had the "exploding capacitor" problems, but fortunately we were able to secure replacements before they actually exploded. One requirement for this server is for a very large filestore. TB or greater. I won't get that if I split the disks between servers. (Can you build an md device from network block devices?) I'm using RAID-6 as I've been bitten in the past with a 2-disk failure. (and been able to recover from it by using mdadm and advice given to others via this mailing list) This server will have a backup server, identical in configuration (although that's arguably not the best solution). The critical data will be backed to tape (as it is currently on the server it's replacing) and we have a good program of tape cycling with off-site backups being held. The file-store part just has to be reliable - it's all re-generable (program binaries, libraries, etc) so it doesn't have to be backed up to tape. The client already has nearly a dozen other fileservers which I've built for them over the years. This isn't the one server to serve them all, it's just one small piece in their network of servers. They are a small silicon design co. but they have a huge data storage requirement. (Ironically their data storage requirements increases almost in proportion to Moores Law :) And tomorrow I'll be installing their first Gigabit Ethernet switch. This server box has Gb Ethernet. (although I have graphs from all their existing switches to prove that they don't actually need Gb Ethernet, but it's the way of the future, isn't it?) > You have spent some big bux to set this up, spend a few more and harden > it. Eh? I haven't spent "big bux" at all. I've (or rather my client) has spent less than £4K for 2 identical servers. I've spent a lot of time on it, sure, but my time comes at a constant cost for this client, so isn't a factor in this. I'd rather spend a lot of time on it now, than rushing it into place and then have to spend more time on it in the future. They are getting the server 2-3 weeks later than originally planned, but they can live with that. (And I'm 100 miles from their site, so not having to rush up the motorway if it does fail is a plus-point for me) My client is a small company. 40 people, limited funds, (and no mail room!), but great ideas. They've gone through good times and bad times over the years I've been working with them. Right now is a good time, but money is still tight. I agree that you get what you pay for, but sometimes you just have to make do. When times have been good, they've bought Dell servers which I've installed Debian and s/w RAID on, and it's all "jsut worked", but when times aren't so good, you have no choice but to source from scratch and build according to budget. These servers will serve the purpose they want - affordable storage and compute for the application they have been built for (a combined MySQL/CVS home-grown application, as well as a disk store). I've been working for these guys for over 6 years now, and in that time all the servers I've built for them have been gracefully retired rather than gone terminally tits-up. I'm quite proud of that. It's not been easy, but with time and perseverance, and good help from the "community" everythings worked out just fine. The first server I built for them is now sitting next to me at home still running. It had 4 x 18Gb drives which we very soon upgraded to 8 18Gb drives, both drive sets running s/w RAID 5. It had 100GB of storage on it 5 years ago, and its performance (for the day) was stellar. Nowadays that's just peanuts, but thats progress for you! > Just an old guy rambling- Gordon, just another old guy making a living. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
