[mdlug] Time to build a new server

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Sat, 2011-08-13 at 14:06 -0400, Aaron Kulkis wrote:
> Robert Adkins II wrote:
> > My intention is to have one internal drive containing the OS, configuration,
> > etc., etc. and a series of externally accessible Hotplug drives. Two will be
> > in a RAID 1 set containing partitions separating the various datashares. The
> > remaining hot plug bays will be used for nightly/bi-nightly or even just
> > weekly back-up purposes.
> Unless your purpose is to have multiple machines accessing the
> same files, and hitting them pretty hard, this will actually result
> in slower response on your primary desktop machine.
> Even NFS or Samba over gigabit ethernet is slow compared to
> a directly connected disk on a SATA port, or even EIDEIDE.

True.  But you may not notice.

> What I would do is to make this a "backup server" which
> automatically conducts backups via some mechanism such
> as remote execution and/or rsync, and copying the desired
> data onto the fileserver.

For backups I'd recommend looking at SDFS/OpenDedeup.
<http://wmmi.net/documents/OpenDedup.pdf>
<http://www.opendedup.org/>

> > Anyone here have familiarity with particular server mainboard manufacturers
> > that support such a setup on Linux out of the box with a default kernel?
> I strongly support Gigabyte's products.  And almost all of them
> have E-SATA plugs.

I fervently recommend *against* white-box solutions.  Always.  Never
build yourself.  It is no longer reasonable [or maybe not even possible]
to white-box yourself to a stable server.  Versions, specs, and
firmwares change way to fast to for anyone to do a proper job unless
that is what-they-do.

> > (Yeah, I can easily build a kernel, but if I don't have to in order to get
> > things up and running, why should I?)
> openSUSE.

+1 (openSUSE)