Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

sm-admin - [SM-Admin] Getting things going again...

sm-admin AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Developer Only Discussion List

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Adam Clark <adamsgl AT dhbit.ca>
  • To: sm-admin AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [SM-Admin] Getting things going again...
  • Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2005 18:04:34 -0700

Hi all,

First, before saying anything else, I'd like to apologise for the
situation the SMGL site's in. This truly is my most embarrassing event
as a sysadmin, and something that I really would have liked to have
prevented. There *were* things in the works to be more redundant, more
fault tolerant - but sadly, the real important things like having
automatic backups fell lower in priority to the burn-out I was feeling
from my regular work duties.

It's obviously time to take action and get things back online in a quick
and appropriate fashion.

Now I've seen the suggestions and I think it would be a great idea to
have SMGL-purchased servers. I can see this taking some time though,
for a few reasons - a) pieces need to be purchased and assembled before
the system can even have an install done, b) financially, SMGL doesn't
have things in place yet (as far as I understand), and I'm sure other
factors as to where would really be a good place to host the system
could take some time as well.

I would like to make the argument though that the location where things
are hosted based on who we have 'available' currently is moot, or should
be a very low priority. We've seen turnover at every level in the SMGL
organization, and it's entirely likely that whoever we may have admin an
SMGL server (or servers) at the physical level now, will probably not be
the same person or persons who's adminning it 6 months, or a year, or 3
years down the road. I agree we should have an organization that's got
an SLA, can replace bits for us, etc. But where we put servers based on
who's at what position in the SMGL structure should fall to a much lower
priority, imho.

Anyhow, prior to seeing the -Admin postings, I had put together thoughts
on getting things back up... here's what I can offer right away:

I have a server available which has the following hardware:

- Tyan server board
- 2 x 1.2Ghz P3 Tualatin cpu's
- 1GB ECC RAM

It currently has 2 18GB SCSI drives in it, but space requirements are
much more, so was thinking of purchasing 2 200GB (or 160's, depending on
what's available today) IDE drives, using one of the SCSI drives as
boot/OS and the IDE drives as a software RAID 1'd setup.

This system could be completely utilized for SMGL purposes, and could be
the basis on which other systems are slaved from. It could be up and
running within a few days, too.

Whether this setup is useful or not, I do strongly agree that whatever
path we go down there should be off-site backups (and not just at one
location), and if we could do it, have servers that can be set very
quickly as master systems in the case that the primary server goes down.

At any rate, I'd appreciate any feedback, as I'd like to go pick up hard
drives tomorrow if this option is utilized at all.

-Adam

Attachment: pgpRF92nSI5FX.pgp
Description: PGP signature




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page