TM-SERVER10

[Teddy Mills]

Hi TLUG! Been a while.
I left my email account for a few months that collects mailing list emails.
It queued up like 21,000 emails, and I finally got them sorted out again. :)
16,384 messages per inbox seems to be a softlimit.

Anyways, Im building a Linux Server right from scratch.
I have selected no hardware or software yet.

Below are my ideas, please read them and reply to the TLUG list or myself
with your
ideas and advice.  I thank you all, I'll be sure to be at the next meeting!
I missed the  last one just 2 days ago! Ack!

/teddy

PS:
I know O'Reilly has a book out called Managing RAID on Linux. Im getting
that book asap.


*********
FUNCTION:
*********
To build a LINUX MYSQL4 production server to handle from 100-5000 small(<1k)
database transactions daily.
Mission critical. Downtime to be minimized as much as possible during the
day.  Nothing else, thats it.
A system that is as bulletproof as possible, against downtime, but doesnt
cost the moon.


*****************
OS and software:
*****************
Redhat Enterprise AS or Fedora Core 2.
I am open to any OS, but I am leaning towards using Fedora Core 2.
I dont see anything in Enterprise Server AS that will help me.
All software will be the latest open source versions of
Apache2, MySQL4, maybe Samba
all compiled from tar sources.



***********
RAID
***********
I am going to use a SCSI RAID and SCSI drives, so I am not going to use any
software RAIDs or IDE drives.  I dont want to have to boot into Linux just
to get access
to the RAID drives, if possible.

I would like the Linux OS to be inside the RAID, but if that is not
possible,
then just the RAID to hold the MySQL data in say in /dev/sdb1.
That means I assume my booting Linux OS would reside on say a 4GB IDE. hmmm.

I thought about RAID 5, but I think I am going with a RAID1. RAID1 is secure
reliable and fast. Just kinda slow on the writes. Im okay with that. A RAID
5
means dropping 1 or 2 G's on the extra large capacity SCSI drives.

Im going with a SCSI RAID1, unless convinced otherwise.
I am leaning towards the MEGARAID 1600 SCSI RAID CONTROLLER and 3 80GB SCSI
drives.



************
RAID FORMAT
************
Since I only have 2 drives to worry about both will fit inside the PC, so no
external
closure is needed.

Even better would be a cheap, but decent  hot-swappable system that does
RAID1, but I cant
seem to find any.







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