[K12OSN] Thoughts for my upgrade...
Chris Hobbs (chobbs@silvervalley.k12.ca.us)
Thu, 19 Dec 2002 10:33:40 -0800
Happy holidays gang!
My 6 new servers have come in, and I'm going to be upgrading to them over
the holidays. I'm trying to simplify management of the servers as a group,
and would like your thoughts on these ideas.
The primary server (SVHSAPP01) in the group has 4 fast, large scsi drives,
and I'll be setting them up with software RAID1. Total formatted capacity
will be about 100GB. This will contain /home for all users, and /home will
be exported via nfs to the servers via a dedicated VLAN on my switch. (It's
also shared via samba for windows users.)
User and group info will be synched up using rsync, which is how I currently
manage them. I then only have to add users and groups to SVHSAPP01. It works
great, and is simpler and more robust than using NIS, though admittedly not
realtime. However, I'm synchronizing now every two minutes, and it seems to
work fine.
I'm wondering if there's any reason I shouldn't export /usr, /opt, and
/tftpboot from SVHSAPP01 to the other servers as well. In theory, none of
those filesystems should be having anything written to them under normal
circumstances. It would certainly make upgrading simple, as I'd only have to
touch one machine.
Terminals would connect to SVHSAPP.silvervalley.k12.ca.us, which would
resolve to the different appservers via round-robin DNS. This provides some
rudimentary load balancing, and eliminates one step in our current login
process, using the chooser screen to pick a server. Obvious downside is that
if one server goes down, every n'th terminal will be forced to reboot to try
to get to a different server, at least until I can modify the DNS or fix the
server. I had been considering mosix, but the majority of our users will be
using Mozilla and OpenOffice most of the time, and since those don't
migrate, we wouldn't see much balancing.
100GB is far too large for our tape system to handle well, so I'm
considering putting together a backup server in another building that's
about 150 yards away, but connected by fiber. I'd use rsync to back up
SVHSAPP01 - an interesting sample script on rsync.org shows how to do
incrementals as well as fulls, so that if a teacher or student comes to me
saying they loast a file 3 days ago, I'd still be able to recover it. Using
one of our old app servers and buying a large harddrive for it makes this
much more economical than upgrading to tape robots and such :)
I apologize for taking up so much bandwidth - writing this stuff down helps
me think it through, and if I missed anything dumb, someone here will catch
it. And hopefully, it'll help someone else doing a large installation -
these 6 servers support 140 terminals spread all over our high school campus.
--
Chris Hobbs Silver Valley Unified School District
Head geek: Technology Services Coordinator
webmaster: http://www.silvervalley.k12.ca.us/~chobbs/
postmaster: chobbs@silvervalley.k12.ca.us
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