Nick Barnes wrote:
[ ... ]
I don't want to have to do all that ever again, after this iteration.
You've had a learning experience, I see. :-)
So I'm thinking I probably want to move to a RAID mirror filesystem,
and keep some sort of quality backups offsite.
1. RAID mirror filesystem questions:
1a: should this be vinum? I have read and can follow the handbook
instructions for a vinum root filesystem.
You should use a "real" (not software-driven) hardware RAID solution, say from
3ware or Promise for (parallel) ATA or SATA, or maybe Adaptec or LSI's
SCSI-based RAID hardware if you want to get fancy and are willing to spend the
extra bucks. Note that a good RAID controller comes with a small internal
battery backup which it's cache and the drives are powered off of.
1b: Will it help to upgrade to 5.x, to get this to go smoothly?
Upgrading to 5.x is a seperate matter, but if you are rebuilding the box, it's
a reasonable idea. 5.4 is only a bit different from 4.11 in terms of visible
changes which might affect how you use it, but there are a lot of improvements
underneath in terms of ACPI and USB support, as well as obviously better SMP
(which is less likely to matter for a uniprocessor desktop).
2. taking backups offsite. Seems to me that the best route is a
number of external firewire hard disks. This machine doesn't have
motherboard firewire, so I'll need to get a PCI firewire board.
2a: Recommendations for an affordable PCI firewire board?
The VIA 6202 (I almost said 6502, but that was another era :-) works good, as
does the firewire interface found on sound cards from a common vendor. Limited
testing suggests that they all have very similiar performance and CPU overhead.
2b: Should I upgrade to 5.x for the better firewire hardware support?
The firewire support in 4.x seems to be very good, actually, and I think speaks
highly of the people who wrote it.
3c: Opinions on using firewire hard disks for this at all? Would I be
better off writing DVDs?
Hard drives provide near-online backup, but only a single full iteration. You
can do incrementals to DVD or CD-RW or tape, and keep many iterations handy,
which is far more reliable.
3. making backups.
3a: I'm used to dump/restore, but it seems to me that rsync might be a
better tool for this, as it would allow me to mount and browse the
backup. Opinions?
This is good if you set up an entire system as a backup, although you could
dual-purpose that box and have it act as a fileserver, proxy server, who knows,
as well.
--
-Chuck
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