Re: Installation advice needed for a really stable desktop machine

[Douglas Allan Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca>]

On Thu, Mar 22, 2007 at 12:50:17PM +0100, Joe Hart wrote:
> > I've been using sid for amd64 on my production machine since before it
> > became an official debian port, but for the next few years I will have 0
> > time for fixing stuff that might break, and so I'm gonna use stable
> > instead, starting with etch. Ideally I should make the move in the next
> > few days, and I would very much appreciate some advice:
 
> > * I'm still learning about raid. I have two disks that I can use for /
> > and /home in raid-1, but what should I do with swap? Is there a
> > point/performance loss in putting swap on a raid device? I have a third
> > disk where I could put the swap partition.
> > 
> > I'm using an Athlon X2 3800 processor, 4G ram and an Abit KN8-Ultra
> > nForce4 motherboard.
> > 
> 
> With 4 GB of RAM, you probably don't need a swap at all.  Since you have
> a duel core machine, make sure you use an smp kernel.  Everything should
> work fine and you'll have a fine system that I and others can be jealous
> over.

Agreed, but for your friend Justin Case, I figure that having a bit of
swap acts as an airbag in the event of a head on collision with some
runaway memory hog, in which case the system starts to thrash instead of
just run out of memory.

I have an Athlon 3800+ AM2, 1 GB ram, and two 80 GB Seagate SATA drives.
Each drive has three partitions and each drive is partioned the same.
Partition 1, 64 MB, is raid1 together and has /boot on it.  Partition 2,
16 GB, is raid1 for LV-system on which all the other system partitions,
including swap, are LVs.  Partition 3, the remainder, are each directly
part of a LV-user and on that I have LV-home (I decided I didn't need
raid1 for /home since I have good and frequent backups).  All this was
set up from Etch's installer.

I can't tell you how much performance hit swap takes being on LVM/raid1,
but I figure that since swap causes such a hit anyway, it won't make
much difference.

Etch has been rock solid for me.

YMMV.

Doug.