Thanks for that, Travis! Really, really useful stuff. We'll keep in touch and let you know how we end up. Nick At 11:56 AM 5/29/2002 -0500, you wrote:
On Tue, 2002-05-28 at 07:38, Nick Selby wrote:
We expect that the machine will be a 1.something GHz Pentium processor with a gig of ram and two (or three) 40GB hard drives. The unique data on the primary hard drive would be backed up periodically (probably on an hourly basis) to the secondary drive(s).
What are some of the issues we need to consider here?
First you'll need to consider the partitioning of the HDs! This is the most important step in fighting disk overload. I read a pretty good explanation of Linux partitioning at orielly's website. http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2001/10/11/filesystem.html
While looking for the above, I also spied this! :) http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2002/05/09/sysadminguide.html
The most immediate concerns we can think of are of a calamitous nature: what happens when the machine has an unforeseen restart and files on the primary drive are corrupted? Can we remotely instruct the machine to boot from the secondary drive?
You'll need to figure out what kind of HD setup you want to run. Raid? Mirrored or striped or both?
Also, what kind of backup you'll run with the other company? As noted above, you said an hourly back up, but if you'll be seeing 10K hits a day on an e-commerce site, you'll want to backup more than just once each hour. You could be loosing nearly 500 transactions in the space of 1 hour! :(
You may want to look at building a small machine to handle all the loging/backups of the primary?! This way, the main machine won't have to be bogged down with LOG daemons. Don't ask how to do this, I've not yet tried. ;)
as far as booting from a second drive, you can do that if the second drive is setup to run linux by itself. You'll just edit lilo to point to the second drive as the default boot. However, if the primary drive is toast, you'll have a hard time getting the machine to come back to life anyway because the primary drive is where the MBR lives! :)
Can you let me know what you decide to run with in the end?!
C ya! --
Travis.
For Laptop issuses, check out: http://www.linux-laptop.net For Wireless LAN issues, check out: http://www.linux-wlan.com
Don't forget to document your experiences, tricks, and advice while using Linux. Post it somewhere so we'll all benefit from it. You never know who will be asking the same question next time.