From: Scott Francis (darkuncledarkuncle.net)
Date: Fri Feb 06 2004 - 17:07:47 CST

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On Tue, Feb 03, 2004 at 03:36:26AM -0800, vex555gmx.net said:
> On Mon, 2 Feb 2004 09:57:43 -0800
> Scott Francis <darkuncledarkuncle.net> wrote:
>
> > be glad it's only 2 hours. :) I set up a RAID5 of 4x160GB 5400RPM IDE
> > disks a while back (2 disks per promise PCI IDE card), and parity
> > rebuild on that takes _fourteen_ hours. Not fun. However ...
>
> wow - thats totally useless for a web/mail server. Even two hours every
> couple of months is going to have clients bitching.

don't crash the server and you won't have to do the parity rebuild. :)

(I know, I know ...)

> > definitely you want multiple filesystems. At the minimum, / /tmp /var
> > /home/usr and /usr/local.
>
> Done this ecxept for the /usr/local. Why that one? Also I realise that
> mail/web docs/ logs etc go in /var so that has to be the biggest, but
> how big do /usr /usr/local /home and /tmp need to be ? (P3 1.2gig 1gig
> ram, 2 gig swap)

take advantage of different mount flags for /usr and /usr/local -
theoretically, after you do the initial install, you could mount /usr
read-only (yes, you'd have to have /usr{obj,ports,local,X11R6,src} all
mounted separately, so probably not feasible) ... I guess mainly because I've
always split up /usr/local (where new software installs typically go) from
/usr. If an install blows up, it doesn't hose /usr. Since post-install
nothing is in /usr/local/{bin,sbin}, you can recover to post-install more
quickly losing /usr/local than losing all of /usr. *shrug*

> > fsck will run on every filesystem not cleanly unmounted. However, that
> > probably won't be any slower than a single massive partition (and you
> > may find that it will be faster). You may also wish to use the soft
> > updates mount option on your RAID filesystem; I did that (450GB
> > filesystem) and read/write performance improved considerably.
>
> I've heard of problems with softupdates. I want reliability and uptime
> over performance.

Perhaps somebody else can comment on softupdates problems; I haven't heard of
anything that is concrete enough to outweigh the performance benefits,
especially on slower hardware.

> > cheap IDE solution. I avoid the parity rebuild problem by being _very_
> > careful to cleanly unmount the filesystem and the RAID set.
>
> The box will be in a co-lo location 4 hours drive from here with ups and
> diesel backup so it should be OK - but who knows?

indeed, you never know what may happen.
--
       Scott Francis | darkuncle(at)darkuncle(dot)net | 0x5537F527
"I gave you the chance of aiding me willingly, but you have elected the way
of pain!" -- Saruman, speaking for sysadmins everywhere

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