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Official Server Upgrade discussion

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Yeah 4 gig is plenty. Keep this in mind.

Using a non-windows OS or not, ya still do need a fresh reboot every so often. So I think getting a fresh OS installed, everything configured and tweaked before it goes to the hosting facility will also allow for much smoother running. Clarity I must give you props though for keepin this thing up and running as long as it has.

I dont know Dryden's procedure for building and installing, but I would guess that you could order this, have it within a few days to a week, take probably a couple days to build it, install OS, configure, tweak, whateva........ Sound about right Dry?
 
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BrutusMaximus said:
Using a non-windows OS or not, ya still do need a fresh reboot every so often.
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Nah ... :wink2:

BrutusMaximus said:
I would guess that you could order this, have it within a few days to a week, take probably a couple days to build it, install OS, configure, tweak, whateva........ Sound about right Dry?
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Yup. The parts don't take any more than an hour to assemble -- I mean the heatsinks are the hardest part to deal with with the Xeon processors. It usually takes me between 3-4 hours to go from a box of parts to a running PC w/ OS, then I'll run MemTest86+ for a 12-hour burn in period, then SETI@Home for another 12-hour burn in at 100% CPU load. Beyond that, it doesn't take more than a few hours to configure things to taste (setting up DNS, ripping out slow IPV6 stuff, removing unused services).
 
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CleveBucks said:
That looks like a pretty kick-ass config. Mega props. If we start to host more video files and eventually have a staff photographer, it would be pretty easy to swap in more HDD space.
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From what I've seen, we have plenty of storage between 4-8 users that would be willing to host videos either by themselves or as mirrors to spread out the bandwidth.

And I think we should have our own guest photographer in Hayn, but I heard that we couldn't cover recruiting if we had an staff photographer that takes gameday pictures of OSU. I heard that's why the Ozone stopped covering recruiting. I may be wrong about all of this.
 
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Okay, here's where we are;

- Going to touch base with osugrad21 and 3yards to see where we are with the drive. If we're done, we're done -- and we can run with the config above. If there's anything else coming in, we can get an idea of how much that might be, and Dry/BMax can tweak the current spec relative to the extra cash. Unless of course that we're all happy as-is, no matter what, in which case I can start ordering tomorrow.

- I'm going to defer to Dryden on the assembly and basic configuration, meaning I'll have the parts shipped to him. Unless of course someone has an issue with this, so speak now or forever blah blah. Dryden, if it works for you, you'll ship directly to AZ when we're all 100% comfortable that it's set up the way we need it. I suspect (and I apologize for this in advance) that I'll need some hand holding in regards to how everything is going to be configured and organized, the 'structure' of cinnamon isn't the best. At some point we should probably trade some PMs and talk about what the new box will need, and how, and also get you on Cinny to look around a bit. I don't think it makes sense to ship it here for me to do what I need to (install vB and mangle it in order to reinstall all of our little bells and whistles), but if we have to, that's not the end of the world either. Seems like I should be able to do everything via SecureFX and SecureCRT remotely.
 
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I think his spec list is perfect, dont think any adjustments are needed at all. In fact I will be the first to admit that it's better than what I was talkin about. I also think it would be a good idea to ship it to Dry and let him take care of install and such, since it sounds like he has more server/linux/unix experience than the rest of us. Up to him of course. And yeah you should be able to do anything you need via CRT. I can always help with some of that as well.
 
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Just a question for clarification.

It looks like you are using a 4 drive RAID-5 array? That would give you 108+ GB of usable space, with 36 GB used for protection.

Good protection balanced with cost but if you lose more than one drive you are down.

Or are you saying you are using RAID -1 mirroring. That is what it looks like. Then you have 72+ GB usable and you can lose 2 drives and still operate. You lose some write performance, write twice, read once but it gives solid protection.

The more drives the better, the CPU's and Memory will always be able to outperform the mechanical drives.

Good call with the redundant power and the add in controller. After drives, those are the components that fail first.

Cooling is always important.
 
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bucknola said:
It looks like you are using a 4 drive RAID-5 array? That would give you 108+ GB of usable space, with 36 GB used for protection.
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No, actually I'm suggesting 3-drives in a RAID-5 array + 1-drive as an always-on hot spare. This way, if an array drive fails, there's already a backup on-site in the chassis in AZ to rebuild the failed drive from (the 2010S controller does this on the fly when a drive fails). This should cover BP while a replacement drive is shipped to the facility (or even worse, waiting for the staff at the hosting facility to actually insert the drive, though it doesn't take more than 2 minutes with the drive caddies in the chassis). With this setup, BP can still run at 100% with a failed drive, and could still tolerate even another drive going down before the server experiences a performance hit.

e.g. BP will run with one drive (25% of total) completely dead at 100% availability. BP could run with two drives (50% of total) completely dead at reduced availability, provided that two drives don't die at the precise same point in time -- very rare, and at that point you've got bigger problems than bad hard drives.

bucknola said:
Good call with the redundant power and the add in controller. After drives, those are the components that fail first.

Cooling is always important.
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These SuperMicro cases are beasts. They've got four hot-swap fans behind the SCSI backplane controller at the front of the case to pull air off the hard drives, two hot-swap fans at the rear of the case to exhaust air, and a snap-on plastic pathway that directs all airflow in the case over the tops of the processors.

Clarity said:
Backups. Cinnamon will stay online. It can be used as a backup. I remember there's some utility (rsync?) that can be configured to do automated backups from one machine to another, surely the two machines can be set up in such a way that this happens through a direct connection. Currently I go in and do a mysqldump, tar up the resulting file, and download it to a local machine here. Obviously this is cumbersome and clumsy, and means we back up less frequently than we should.
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rsync works, but I wouldn't recommend it since most all of the 'r' (remote) services have exploits. An easier and more secure solution is to enable Samba disk shares on Cinnamon and network copy between the two servers at the facility in AZ. A 6-line shell script can handle that, and it can be automated to run via cron in the middle of the night.

I use a script similar to the following for a local phpBB2 install:

Code: 
#!/bin/sh

tar cvf /tmp/phpBB2-`date +\%Y-\%m-\%d`.tar -c -C /var www/html/phpBB2 lib/mysql/phpBB2
gzip /tmp/phpBB2-`date +\%Y-\%m-\%d`.tar
mount -t smbfs -o username=someuser,password=somepass //server2/backups /mnt/server2
mv /tmp/phpBB2-`date +\%Y-\%m-\%d`.tar.gz /mnt/server2/.
umount /mnt/server2
 
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Just an update for those keeping score. We look to be ordering all the parts in the next few days, will update here as the process moves along.

Regarding further donations, we are certainly not turning any away, and just because we're finally ordering the machine parts, doesn't mean the site's needs are all spoken for -- particularly if there is no Fall drive this year. I only mention this since a few people have asked. So the links will stay up a bit longer, there are still tees (as I understand), etc.
 
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Yes... there are still shirts available. Actually I have more than what is listed in the shirt thread (page 12 second post down) from people who did not pay for thier order. I will update that list sometime later this week after I take inventory.
 
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Just a quick note to let everyone know the parts have all been ordered.

Came in a bit higher than projected (per the norm) as we had to find a secondary provider for the HDDs (CDW) who came in $25 higher per drive. Then add in OH tax for all the orders, and shipping.

Will continue to give updates as things move along, right now we can reasonably expect things to show up at Dryden's location next week.
 
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(CDW)
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Eek, they can really rape you if you arent careful. We have a business account with them, so I think we get 10% off or something, but even with that much off, they are still usually 5% higher than everywhere else :)

Anyway, glad to hear it's been ordered. Everybody needs to give Dryden some props, has dont an excellent job with this.
 
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First part of the order came in today with our afternoon FedEx delivery ... so I've got here, sitting on my desk right now:

A motherboard, a RAID controller, two Xeon processors, 4Gb of RAM, a CD-ROM drive and a floppy ...

now if only I had a case and some hard drives to use all this stuff in. :(

:wink2:
 
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