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So, we've purchased our cool new servers, from Cambridge, MA vendor "PCs for Everyone". Todd and I and several other friends have gotten systems from them before, and have been extremely pleased -- they know their stuff, including Linux, which is (...) (20 years ago, 28-Feb-04, to lugnet.admin.general, lugnet.admin.finance, lugnet.general, lugnet.lego.direct, lugnet.robotics, lugnet.trains, lugnet.technic, lugnet.space, lugnet.castle, lugnet.org, lugnet.announce) !!
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| | RE: New LUGNET server hardware details
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Ok, first time I've posted to off-topic, so hopefully I put in the TO header properly :) Matthew, I just want to point out one thing to make sure of with the two processors you are getting now. Make sure the stepping is same so when you go to dual (...) (20 years ago, 28-Feb-04, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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| | Re: New LUGNET server hardware details
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(...) Hmm, no tape drive or CDRW. How does off-site backup work---over the wires to Todd's office? I do hope that there is a backup outside of Boston. . . (20 years ago, 28-Feb-04, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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| | Re: New LUGNET server hardware details
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(...) Interesting that the HDDs are serialATA rather than SCSI. However from my experiences this week no bad thing. One server with dual HDDs in a mirrored RAID config had the SCSI controller backplane fail. However replacing it lost all the data on (...) (20 years ago, 29-Feb-04, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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| | Re: New LUGNET server hardware details
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(...) Nope, I hate tape backup (too slow, too small, too expensive, too unreliable) and CDR's are too small and too labor intensive. Of course, the lack of a CDRW drive doesn't preclude physical media backups from being carried out elsewhere. (...) (...) (20 years ago, 29-Feb-04, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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| | Re: New LUGNET server hardware details
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(...) Matthew could answer this better than I, but my opinion is that the money is put to better use in ECC memory, and gobs of it. We're starting of with 1GB of RAM, upgradeable to 8GB. Since the OS automatically allocates unused RAM toward (...) (20 years ago, 29-Feb-04, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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| | Re: New LUGNET server hardware details
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(...) Excellent point. Looks like there's three differentm steppings for this particular CPU model, and any of the first two can be mixed freely, but the third can't. I've messed with all this stuff before, but it doesn't hurt to be reminded of it, (...) (20 years ago, 29-Feb-04, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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| | Re: New LUGNET server hardware details
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(...) Yes, no one there to change tapes or CDs. The data will be frequently synced to off-site locations -- not just Todd's place. (...) What, planning for a nuclear calamity are you? :) (But yeah, we'll have that.) (20 years ago, 29-Feb-04, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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| | Re: New LUGNET server hardware details
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(...) That summarizes it pretty well. SATA is something like five times cheaper per byte, and that's not even counting that we'd need a more expensive motherboard with a SCSI controller. Right now, disk isn't really the bottleneck for the load, so (...) (20 years ago, 29-Feb-04, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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| | Re: New LUGNET server hardware details
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(...) Not to mention the fact that current IDE drives are just as reliable as SCSI. SCSI is nice if you need maximum speed and can live with little storage space (SCSI above 74 GB is rare still, IDE goes to 250GB easily But the generated heat and (...) (20 years ago, 29-Feb-04, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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| | Re: New LUGNET server hardware details
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(...) I agree completely on the utility of tape. Speed, size, cost, and reliability are always a problem; tape systems seem to always be a generation behind what disk drives need (and with the relative demand curves, they are not going to catch up). (...) (20 years ago, 29-Feb-04, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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| | Re: New LUGNET server hardware details
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(...) Yeah, sorry, I wasn't saying I though that you should have gone the SCSI route (I thought my anecdotes would have showed that!) more that I thought it was interesting the move away from SCSI for custom built servers. A few years ago it would (...) (20 years ago, 1-Mar-04, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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| | Re: New LUGNET server hardware details
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(...) Look at (URL). Although I need to update that page. Right now, our install server is way underpowered, but it should be getting upgraded sometime this spring (just in time for BU Linux 4.0, hopefully). Because of this, it's only available on (...) (20 years ago, 1-Mar-04, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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| | Re: New LUGNET server hardware details
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(...) Don't forget to turn off atime updates ('noatime' option in FreeBSD fstab) on all filesystems that don't need it (everything but var usually). This will prevent all those reads from inadvertantly creating filesystems writes. Brickshelf too is (...) (20 years ago, 1-Mar-04, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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| | Re: New LUGNET server hardware details
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(...) I hope that you are planning to use this extra storage for mirroring (I forget the numbers... RAID-1 ?). Mirroring will reduce your critical path failure from a HD, but will (remember statistics) halve the MTBF. With one drive at 50k hours (...) (20 years ago, 1-Mar-04, to lugnet.admin.general)
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| | Re: New LUGNET server hardware details
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(...) Yeah, we're going to examine all of the data and see which should be mounted with which special options. Some stuff will be mounted 'sync' to reduce the chance of data loss in the event of power failure or system crash, neither of which should (...) (20 years ago, 1-Mar-04, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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| | Re: New LUGNET server hardware details
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(...) Yes, there's going to be basically insane amounts of redundancy -- not just live mirroring, but staged images so that any corrupted data isn't instantly propagated to all the backups. (...) Oh, what, the above part wasn't geeky? :) (...) With (...) (20 years ago, 1-Mar-04, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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