The Comms Room

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derobert

10:00 PM

(You could even do it with LILO... But grub has much better support.)

voretaq7

@derobert generally speaking if you're doing software RAID of the system drives you probably want to do RAID 1 anyway

derobert

@voretaq7 well, RAID10 is a possibility.

voretaq7

FreeBSD allows this too and with almost no special gyrations required (you install normally, but leave the last cylinder of the HD unused - then set up a geom_mirror from one device to the other. It grabs the boot loader along with everything else)

@derobert yes, but if you're getting into more than mirroring 2 drives you probably want hardware handling the disk workload at that point

(it also adds to the complexity of which drives do/don't get boot loaders -- not particularly hard to manage, but One More Thing To Remember if you have to do an array rebuild)

derobert

@voretaq7 I've done 24, and there really isn't much overhead. RAID5/6 have CPU overhead, of course, and you have to send it across the PCI-E bus multiple times, but, it still saturates the SAS bus.

@voretaq7 well, they all get bootloaders.

@voretaq7 mdraid works per-block-device, so you typically use it per-partition. So you can easily slice off a bit for /boot which is raid1, even if the rest of the disk is something else

WesleyDavid

HOWDY @REBECCACHERNOFF!!! bats ball of yarn your way

voretaq7

10:05 PM

@derobert it's not the CPU I'm concerned about, it's the storage subsystem. At that point I wait a big ol' honkin' man-eatin' battery-backed write cache so I can throw data at my disks and not have to care about saturating the storage bus :)

WesleyDavid

@voretaq7 L2ARC and a Tripp-Lite. Done. =P

Iain

@WesleyDavid @RebeccaChernoff has moved from community to dev for a while

voretaq7

@WesleyDavid . . . Just for that you get the crappy clay kitty litter next week.

WesleyDavid

@voretaq7 At least it's not that pine stuff. Hurts my willy.

derobert

@voretaq7 Yes, battery backed cache is very nice. Depends on the application, of course.

Iain

10:07 PM

@voretaq7 fullers earth is pretty good

voretaq7

you can do the same with the various GEOM RAID providers - though again, if I want anything more complex than "Mirror these drives" I'm of the opinion it's time for dedicated hardware.

I'm a big fan of software mirroring on lightly loaded machines (like web front-ends), but everything else I'd rather see offloaded. Just the way I am with storage.

I freely admit I'm a curmudgeonly old bastard though

@Iain BRAND X FOR HIM!

Iain

@voretaq7 tis prolly good enough

derobert

I've had my share of fun with RAID hardware bugs. So I avoid it unless I really need it.

voretaq7

@derobert never had a RAID hardware bug bite me, though the price tag for the RAID controllers often do.

actually that's not entirely true: I had an IBM x440 RAID card bite me once.
But that's because we did something terrible to it.

ewwhite

I think hardware RAID is a good thing... but once you get to a certain class of servers, it's a given.

Iain

10:13 PM

what OS do hardware RAID cards run ?

voretaq7

@ewwhite It's sort of a given on everything these days (even desktop SATA controllers can do "RAID" -- it's just offloaded to the CPU and you're often better off with the software RAID your OS provides)

@Iain VMS :-)

ewwhite

FPGA's, right?

Rebecca Chernoff

@WesleyDavid o:

Iain

@voretaq7 that works for me, my first sysadmin job was with VMS

voretaq7

a lot of the parity and disk I/O control is ASICs (which might be implemented with FPGAs these days).
IBM's I think run a super-stripped-down Linux for the management console these days like the HMC

Adrian

10:29 PM

@Iain Ugh. Our school had a bunch of donated Vax3100s. Talk about agonizing.

voretaq7

@Adrian HEY!

Iain

@Adrian sadly DEC didn't adapt and they were subsumed :(

voretaq7

Don't be hatin' on the tiny VAXen

take inspiration from their big brother

(gut the little fuckers and stuff 'em full of those airline booze bottles)

Adrian

@voretaq7 I'm sure the bigger ones were wonderful. Trying to stuff an entire Computer Science department on one was a bit of a stretch.

Iain

@Adrian 11/780 was big - filled a room as did our 5000 series beast

voretaq7

10:34 PM

@Adrian well, I wouldn't say wonderful, but you could certainly fit more booze in one...

So I was looking for a VAX(3100)BAR image for @Adrian....

Didn't find one, but Google tried their best to help:

wait... wrong image...

Adrian

@voretaq7 hehehe.

voretaq7

That's better.

(I had to click... unfortunately apparently Target is out of stock on obsolete VAX hardware.)

Weekend. ROAR.
(i flee)

Adrian

@voretaq7 laterz. Nobody should be working late on Friday anyway since you obviously don't make production changes on Fridays....

WesleyDavid

@Adrian Saturday is my Friday. =|

Zypher

10:54 PM

ahh, my day is now complete got x11 forwarding to my vps setup

WesleyDavid

@Zypher How're they working out? Decent so far?

Have you logged into your SolusVM control panel yet?

Zypher

yep, havn't had much time to play this week

plan on doing a bunch of playing around and setup on it this weekend

nope havn't logged into that yet

WesleyDavid

@Zypher That's one of the reason I like Xen containers is the VM control that you get. Beats OpenVZ (for that and a few more reasons)

Zypher

nice, i'll have to look at it when i get home.

oo i'll keep that in mind ... nasty

WesleyDavid

But I'd bring it to Anthony once in a while and say "This month had some odd drops on the control node. Sup man?"

Zypher

10:59 PM

speaking of home

time to get outta the damn office :)

WesleyDavid

@Zypher GO HOME!! </tracy ulman>

Go shoot something.

DJ Pon3

Adrian

11:24 PM

sigh PHP5 and they still have object names in Hebrew hanging around from the Zend days?

mgorven

11:41 PM

@derobert GRUB2 can boot from RAID5/6 (and LVM), so you don't even need a separate /boot.

WesleyDavid

"You can't vote on your own post." <-- OUTRAGE!! My post is awesome!

mgorven

@WesleyDavid You also can't vote on a community wiki post you created, which is a bit silly IMO

DJ Pon3

You can't vote on your own post because you're a kitty

WesleyDavid

MOAR KITTEHS!!

That's me on the right.

DJ Pon3

that'll be right!

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