On Mon, Nov 28, 2005 at 02:29:21PM -0500, Bob Ababurko wrote:
> ... I wanted a
> system that did not have moving parts. This was to hopefully extend the
> life of the machine and increase uptime by eliminating the hard drives
> and power supplies with moving parts. I am not paying for power so I
> can say that I am not concerned about consumption at this point. This
> is only due to the fact that $ is finite at the present time and cannot
> weigh heavily on the list of importance.
>
> The alternative is to use a dual P3 that we have but I am still
> interested in optimum availibility. Do I implement RAID 1 with two
> drives.....OR does this create more problems that it is worth by
> introducing more parts to fail(two drives. Do I implement a Flash card
> reader and install OpenBSD/pf on a compact flash drive? I am not sure
> where I should be drawing the line...I mean do I pay attention to drive
> redundency or power redundency....or even actual firewall redundency?
>
> What is the most bang for the buck in terms of availibility short of a
> hot standby firewall configuration?
There are a couple of other options, depending on your space, and what
kind of server you are running.
RAID is cool, and not all that difficult. One thing to keep in mind is
that a failing drive is likely to take the whole IDE bus it's connected
to with it - usually it just confuses it, but there are tales of dying
drives frying the connected controller and any other drives connected to
the controller.
However, if you keep that in mind, I've personally had little or no
trouble with RAID, and it has saved my backside at least once (very,
very old disk I was testing in a rather old machine - I put it in for a
little extra capacity, but, luckily, was smart enough not to trust it).
Also, depending on what you want to do with the machine, hot standby is
likely to be a good plan. ;-)
OpenBSD can do failover firewalls very well. If you have a server with
data that does not change too often, rsync is likely able to keep up and
you can cobble a couple of simple scripts together to do failover.
If, on the other hand, we are talking something as highly variable as a
mailserver, well... keeping the data synchronized will be rather
difficult.
Joachim
