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Adauth 1.2.1: Adauth's development has slowed a lot of late as I've had other priorities (see Kashflow API Gem) ... http://t.co/N7CmaBjV
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As I mentioned a couple of posts ago one of the HDDs in my server (Londinium) failed. Which aside from being a PITA to replace also took all the ripped TV Series with it so I'm now faced with the task of ripping my series again, which last time came to just over a TB. So this time I decided I would need some redundancy in case of HDD failure. RAID is the obvious choice here, automatic "backups" of the data and no input from me after initial setup (except for when things go wrong).
Recently at work we have had a few hard drive failures in RAID10 (Mirrored Stripe) arrays and the array not actually recover resulting in complete data loss. So mirroring isnt the way I want to take Londinium, also by definition I would need double the space I want to get it which would be far to expensive.
RAID3 or 5 become the obvious choices now, and of the two RAID5 seems more logical too me, I'd rather all the disks be equal players in the array instead of having just one for parity.
My previous post explained how to setup a RAID5 software array in Ubuntu 10.10 which is exactly what I followed during my setup except for one detail. I said that /boot could be on the array no probs, this is not what I found when scaled upto 4 2TB HDDs instead of 3 8GB, for what ever reason grub was unable to install onto the 4 drives and I was unable to finish the install. Knowing that all I needed to do was put /boot and grub on another drive I decided to put in a USB Flash Drive and use it as the first boot deivce and have it fire up the array for me.
[media display]2[/media]
As you can see with an extension and some cable ties the pendrive is much safer than if it was sticking out the back of the server. But after it was all setup and working I had this niggling feeling in the back of my mind that leaving the fate of my RAID array up to a pendrive was a bad idea thats when I had the thought "Its only 512mb, I could dd it and keep a copy off server." so I did and with the help of dropbox my /boot drive is now automatically backup and cloud stored, can't get much safer than that.
This rebuild features a new case to replace the repeatedly modified one Londinium used to have.
[media display]3[/media]
I swear it looks more and more like an actual server everytime I upgrade it.
For this new server I have started writing a Rails app called Loupe, which for the moment only displays service and disk information but I plan for it to be a server administration app. It will have a public front end so that you can show off your servers stats. The Demo is at http://londinium.arcath.net/
Recently at work we have had a few hard drive failures in RAID10 (Mirrored Stripe) arrays and the array not actually recover resulting in complete data loss. So mirroring isnt the way I want to take Londinium, also by definition I would need double the space I want to get it which would be far to expensive.
RAID3 or 5 become the obvious choices now, and of the two RAID5 seems more logical too me, I'd rather all the disks be equal players in the array instead of having just one for parity.
My previous post explained how to setup a RAID5 software array in Ubuntu 10.10 which is exactly what I followed during my setup except for one detail. I said that /boot could be on the array no probs, this is not what I found when scaled upto 4 2TB HDDs instead of 3 8GB, for what ever reason grub was unable to install onto the 4 drives and I was unable to finish the install. Knowing that all I needed to do was put /boot and grub on another drive I decided to put in a USB Flash Drive and use it as the first boot deivce and have it fire up the array for me.
[media display]2[/media]
As you can see with an extension and some cable ties the pendrive is much safer than if it was sticking out the back of the server. But after it was all setup and working I had this niggling feeling in the back of my mind that leaving the fate of my RAID array up to a pendrive was a bad idea thats when I had the thought "Its only 512mb, I could dd it and keep a copy off server." so I did and with the help of dropbox my /boot drive is now automatically backup and cloud stored, can't get much safer than that.
This rebuild features a new case to replace the repeatedly modified one Londinium used to have.
[media display]3[/media]
I swear it looks more and more like an actual server everytime I upgrade it.
For this new server I have started writing a Rails app called Loupe, which for the moment only displays service and disk information but I plan for it to be a server administration app. It will have a public front end so that you can show off your servers stats. The Demo is at http://londinium.arcath.net/
CSS Based on Twitters Bootstrap
All Content is written by Adam Laycock (Arcath) unless otherwise stated.