Developer Only Discussion List

[Jason Flatt <jflatt AT sourcemage.org>]

On Wednesday 19 October 2005 06:04 pm, Adam Clark wrote:
> 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

I haven't heard one way or another, but based on this message, I'm assuming 
that the drive or drives from the old server are toast and there is no backup 
from before sometime this summer.  Is that correct, or am I totally off base 
on my assumptions?

-- 
Jason Flatt
Source Mage GNU/Linux: Linux so advanced, it may as well be magic.
http://www.sourcemage.org/
jflatt AT sourcemage.org

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