Re: [K12OSN] Thoughts for my upgrade...

Brian Riffle (god@itsbunk.net)
Thu, 19 Dec 2002 19:33:44 -0800 

One thought on the backup...
    Tape drives are pretty cheap right now, at least DLT.  you can get 7 
tape autoloaders pretty easy off of ebay.  While one of the tapes won't 
hold 100GB of data, you can span it to 2 or 3 tapes for a full backup, 
and use the rest for incremental or differential backups.  There is a 
feeling of ease being able to take the last full backups home with you! 
 It might be pretty comparable in cost to the backup server, unless of 
course you already have a fiber between the buildings, the correct media 
converters, and a couple of large hard drives (probably IDE for backup)
Just something you might want to consider....

brian


Chris Hobbs wrote:

> 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.
>




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