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Re: Linux server for work but don't know how?



* Alan & Kerry Shrimpton (loverslane.poodles@ihug.co.nz) spake thusly:
> Hi,
> 
> At work we have one file server with NT4 I think as the OS.  One mail server
> firewall running Linux.  (Hence why I am playing around with it at home).
> We have 3 other computers connected to the network running Windows98.  The
> rest of us use laptops (6 off) which we plug in when we are in the office.
> 
> Now work is talking of upgrading their file server.  They have a quote in
> like 10k New Zealand using the old NT software.  I would love the chance to
> put in a Linux file server but don't feel confident enough.
> 
> What advice can you give me?  How much knowledge does someone really need to
> know to make this happen and ask work if I can do it?

A lot. Don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise. (That doesn't
mean you can't learn this stuff as you go along; just be prepared
to learn a lot.)

> I would appreciate some input on this but I think the project is probably
> too big for me.  They do want mirror disks in case a hard drive crashes but
> don't think they need to go the whole hog with raid control.  

Yes they do. I recently moved moved our NFS/SMB-shared directories
from internal (SCSI) hard drives to a RAID box. CPU I/O wait time
went from 16% down to 4% (that's on a 2-CPU 2Gb RAM UltraSPARC).
Of course if your fileserver doesn't do anything except serving
files, you can live with high wio time... YMMV.

...Then with
> mirror disks do you really need a tape backup?

You always need backup. At least two.

Dima



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