Server at home

Cams · Post by **Cams** » Thu Aug 18, 2005 9:31 am

I'm considering using an emachines P4 1.4 as a server at home and know very little about such things.

How many SPCRers have servers at home? I would imagine quite a few!

I read through this thread but, at present, much of its substance is above my head. So I'm looking for some pointers.

My home set up is two PCs, the main one of which is used only by me and the other, by me and the missus. What I would like would be to have a file server for our data with a RAID array that mirrors one drive. It would have all our files, my translation memories, a rather large amount of mp3s and email.

My main system has two 160 GB SATA SpinPoints which I could use for the server and get another HDD or two for the main system (good excuse for a couple of P120 SpinPoints!) The motherboard on the spare box doesn't have SATA connectors so I presume I could get a PCI card to allow for that? Or should I be looking at a new motherboard?

I'd probably put Linux on a the 40GB IDE drive that is in the system already. (which I have already), which, in itself, would be quite a steep learning curve, so any suggestions as to what version would best suit someone who is fairly Windows savvy but has very little networking experience.

I use a router for my broadband connection and presumably would use that to connect the two clients to the server and have the server hooked up to the broadband connection?

I'd appreciate any advice on this as I'll probably order up the bits that I need when my mobo/RAM/CPU is returned from the retailer after the problem component is found and replaced (as discussed in this thread). I'm particularly keen to hear on how the hard drives should best be arranged for maximum data protection.

Cheers,
Cams

IsaacKuo · Post by **IsaacKuo** » Thu Aug 18, 2005 10:02 am

For a file server, I recommend Debian. It is stable, easy to maintain, and there is a LOT of documentation on how to do server stuff on Debian. It is among the most popular of Linux distributions for servers.

The default Debian install is a bit spartan for a newbie desktop user, but you don't need all that stuff for just a server. Nevertheless, I recommend installing the graphical desktop environment for ease of use. You only need a 2.5gig partition for the OS and .5gig for swap. That leaves the rest of your 40gig drive for data; maybe backups of really important files.

Since you have a fast internet connection, I recommend using Debian's net-installer. It's a small install CD which loads just a very small base system and the rest installs over the internet.

For data protection and robustness, you COULD use RAID1, but I personally wouldn't do it that way. Instead, I'd simply make one drive shared and the other drive is a backup. You can use the command "rsync" to synchronize the files from the shared drive to the backup. Here's the tradeoff between this and RAID1:

In favor of RAID1:
1. All files are always up to date
2. If one drive fails, there is no downtime
3. Seek times for reads are reduced

In favor of rsync backup:
1. Protection against data loss through user error

Me? I like protection against data loss through user error. Even when the computer helpfully asks, "Do you really want to delete 157 files?", I have been known to accidentally click on "Ok" or hit "Enter".

nick705 · Post by **nick705** » Thu Aug 18, 2005 10:51 am

I'd agree with all the above - many people complain that Debian's installer is a bit unfriendly for a Linux newcomer, but it's really quite logical and straightforward, and I actually find it easier and less confusing than the graphical installers of Mandriva, Fedora etc. Just go for one of the basic task-oriented setup options, which would be a fileserver in your case (don't try and get into fine-tuning the installation with tasksel or you'll be there all day). If you've never done it before, it'll probably take you a few attempts to get it right anyway...ahem... especially for a server you'll probably end up playing around a fair bit with the partitioning and filesystem tools.

Debian also has its brilliant apt-get system for installing software packages which makes life so much easier for a Linux newbie - many other distros now have something similar, but Debian's is the original and still the best.

RAID is primarily designed for data availability, not security - unless uptime is critical there's really no need for it in a home or desktop setting except in certain unusual circumstances. You're better off with proper backups, whether to another HDD or some other medium.

When you get your SATA controller (PCI card or mobo) make sure it has Linux support though... most recent Promise, VIA, Highpoint controllers are OK with kernel 2.6 but Google is your friend to be on the safe side...

teknerd · Post by **teknerd** » Thu Aug 18, 2005 11:29 am

for the actual server software go with clark connect.
There is almost no learning curve as once installed (which is very easy) almost all of the configuartion (aside from the first network and user setup) is done via a web interface very similar to routers (although you can use ssh if you like). It is also extremely versatile and can do everything from windows file sharing to being a VPN server to being a full firewall/gateway. Its great.

Cams · Post by **Cams** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 12:35 am

Many thanks for the help folks. I'm still keen on the idea of having a mirror RAID set up in the event of a HDD failure, although I guess such a thing is not absolutely vital if I'm regularly backing up the server a client PC.

Any suggestions on the hardware front? What exactly does one need in order to set up a home server for filesharing and email?

Thanks
Cams

teknerd · Post by **teknerd** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 7:10 am

Very easy way to do it:
Take the hardware you have now, add in a serial ata controller card.
add in another (small) hard drive for holding the OS (clarck connect) and then use the software RAID built into the distro to mirror the two Samsungs and store all of the DATA on there.

IsaacKuo · Post by **IsaacKuo** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 7:15 am

Cams wrote:Any suggestions on the hardware front? What exactly does one need in order to set up a home server for filesharing and email?

Mainly, you just need a computer which can handle the hard drive(s) you intend to use (LBA, SCSI, SATA, etc).

On the processor side, any Pentium II or Celeron or above will provide plenty of processing power. File serving and e-mail is very processor light, even with software RAID5.

For memory, I'd recommend at least 128megs of RAM so you can run a nice user friendly KDE or GNOME GUI on the server. You're a linux newbie, so there's no reason you should deprive yourself of a friendly GUI interface. Unless you're processing a lot of remote files in a database application or compiling large programs, you most likely won't notice a benefit from increased RAM on the server. OTOH, if you ARE using a database application or compiling large programs, the more RAM the better!

For the network interface, 100megabit "Fast Ethernet" is fast enough for most purposes. However, the extra cost for GIGAbit is now pretty small. You don't need everything to be gigabit capable. If not everything is gigabit capable, then you'll be running at 100megabit for now. But for the future, you'll have the flexibility to upgrade to gigabit easily.

BTW, if you do use RAID I'd strongly recommend you use software RAID instead of hardware RAID. Besides being far more flexible, you'll be able to recover easily in case of a controller failure (with hardware RAID, you'd have to get exactly the same controller or hope for the best).

Cams · Post by **Cams** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 7:42 am

Great advice folks, for which many thanks. It does indeed seem achievable with minimum expenditure -- basically I need only one or two new drives for my main PC and a SATA controller for the server. Course, the intended server PC is not going to be quiet, but, as you and I all know, that's another can of worms!

To clarify, I would have:

Internet connection > router > server
Client PCs > router

I have a ZyXEL Prestige 660HW router with 10/100 mbps and 802.11g Wireless. Would that suffice to get me going?

The intended server is a P4 1.5 GHz with 256 megs of RAM so that should do the job nicely. It also has a 40 gig IDE HDD that I could use for the OS.

Cheers,
Cams

Cams · Post by **Cams** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 7:53 am

I've just been thinking, would it not make more sense to get a couple of IDE drives for the server box? How would that work with the software RAID thing? I would only need one optical drive so that would leave three IDE channels spare, one for OS and two for DATA. How would the master/slave thing best be configured? Would that work as well as adding a SATA controller and two SATA drives? Also, the installed PSU doesn't have SATA power connectors: if I did go for SATA drives, is there an adapter for the power from 4-pin molex to SATA?

teknerd · Post by **teknerd** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 9:37 am

SATA is better, you dont have the master/slave confusion thing, the cables are smaller, and its future proof. Plus with dedicated channels for every drive you dont get a bottleneck like with IDE.

IsaacKuo · Post by **IsaacKuo** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 10:42 am

Cams wrote:I've just been thinking, would it not make more sense to get a couple of IDE drives for the server box? How would that work with the software RAID thing?

IMHO, it makes more sense for you to use IDE drives. You'll save some money, and the performance difference will be non-existent over 100Mbit fast ethernet. Even with gigabit ethernet, the performance difference will be small unless you use fast Digital Raptors. And even then...(see below)

There's no reason to worry about how "future proof" it is, since your file server isn't going anywhere. By the time you'll ever have to get a motherboard without IDE, your <500gig IDE drives are going to be looking rather puny.

Software RAID will work equally well with IDE or SATA.

Cams wrote:I would only need one optical drive so that would leave three IDE channels spare, one for OS and two for DATA. How would the master/slave thing best be configured?

The best configuration is one hard drive on the primary IDE, and one hard drive on the secondary IDE, and no slave drives except for an optical drive attached ONLY for OS install (or LiveCD bootup). You should put a small partition on one drive for the OS, and a small partition on the other drive for swap. The rest of the space on each drive is for a large data partition.

Alternatively, you can put your boot drive and one data drive on the primary IDE, and the other data drive on the secondary IDE. This can cause some performance loss in cases where both the boot drive and the first data drive are accessed simultaneously. An IDE channel can only handle one request at a time, so only one drive can "work" at a time. In particular, when a request requires a lengthy seek before returning data, there is no way to make another request to the other drive in the meantime.

I prefer eliminating the separate boot drive. It reduces the overall chances of a hard drive failure. It reduces noise, heat, and power draw. It improves performance because the boot drive is a big fast drive rather than some slower smaller drive. What's not to like?

Cams wrote: Would that work as well as adding a SATA controller and two SATA drives? Also, the installed PSU doesn't have SATA power connectors: if I did go for SATA drives, is there an adapter for the power from 4-pin molex to SATA?

You won't get any performance benefit from SATA over 100mbit fast ethernet. Even if you upgrade to gigabit, you've got a bandwidth problem--both the gigabit ethernet card and the SATA controller will be on the PCI bus. The total bandwidth available in the PCI bus is just barely greater than the limit for gigabit, so you're limited to at best half of gigabit bandwidth anyway. This isn't really a concern with such a small RAID array (nowhere near fast enough to saturate), but it's something to think about if you think you're "futureproofing" anything.

~El~Jefe~ · Post by **~El~Jefe~** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 4:39 pm

Best one I feel is Gentoo. it has no "build" it builds itself to your own specifications and exact system. use Gnome graphical interface if needed. I am doing this all as we speak, learning things as they go, not as hard as I once thought. my friend's Athlon 1 ghz system has 768 ram and 6 hardrives all stuck together. It controls all sorts of things from gateways to whatever, it's basically unhackable and runs like a rocketship, faster than his 2.8C version p4 with 1 gig ram and sata drives. we tried debian type things before but none work so insanely smooth stable and fast as the machine we built as his "everything" box.

just a recommendation. It would run things tighter cooler and faster than any premade build.

-----

oh btw: i agree with using IDE drives. servers have like miniscule draw on them compared to the bandwidth limits. 5400 rpm drives work plenty fine and dandy unless you are like running a large company with them. shrugs.

Cams · Post by **Cams** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 9:58 pm

Thanks for the gentoo recommendation. Certainly worth considering.

On the IDE vs SATA thing; the IDE 160 gig SpinPoints are actually more expensive than their SATA counterparts (£5 dearer, as it happens). The point is that IDE would not reall save me any dosh, other than from having to buy a SATA controller and some PSU adapters.

Does IDE still make sense? Or am I shopping at the wrong place?

IsaacKuo · Post by **IsaacKuo** » Sat Aug 20, 2005 3:34 am

For a file and e-mail server, you could use the slowest Linux distribution in the world and not notice the performance difference. As it is, Debian makes more sense for a number of reasons.

Honestly, I flat out disbelieve the claims of Debian being slower or less stable. Saying "Debian type" leads me to guess that they tried out Debian based distributions like Mepis (slow) or Ubuntu (unstable) or Knoppix (not maintainable). Also, for certain reasons, all the popular Debian variants are based on Debian Testing and/or Debian Unstable, instead of Debian Stable.

Actual Debian Stable is completely stable and fast (especially if you install a processor specific kernel). I mean Enterprise Mission Critical Stable.

Gentoo doesn't actually have any "Stable" option. When it comes to updating packages, Gentoo has a one-size-fits-all approach. This is good if you want up-to-date packages (like Debian Unstable or Ubuntu), but it's not so good if you just want a system to just plain work without significant maintenance time/effort.

If you want to have some idea about Debian vs Gentoo for a server, look around on Linux web sites for the debates.

I prefer Debian over Gentoo even for my desktop workstations. I mainly have older slower systems, so compile times are painful.

kesv · Post by **kesv** » Sat Aug 20, 2005 5:35 am

Cams wrote: To clarify, I would have:
Internet connection > router > server
Client PCs > router

I have a ZyXEL Prestige 660HW router with 10/100 mbps and 802.11g Wireless. Would that suffice to get me going?

Hmm... Basically you want to just plug everything in the Prestige, right ?
Your Zyxel should have some builtin firewalling capability, so you probably want to make sure you have a sane configuration for it. If the server only needs to get email from the internet, then no other traffic should be allowed to it from outside your home network. Also I don't know how the Prestige handles the wireless connectivity part, but you need to make sure it's secured or disallow traffic from any wireless clients to the server. Wireless security is hard topic, so if you have questions about it, you should probably make a new thread about that.

Also you are most likely using the Prestige's dhcp functionality to assign IPs to your machines. It will make things easier if you set the server to always recieve a fixed ip.

nick705 · Post by **nick705** » Sat Aug 20, 2005 6:59 am

Cams wrote:Thanks for the gentoo recommendation. Certainly worth considering.

On the IDE vs SATA thing; the IDE 160 gig SpinPoints are actually more expensive than their SATA counterparts (£5 dearer, as it happens). The point is that IDE would not reall save me any dosh, other than from having to buy a SATA controller and some PSU adapters.

Does IDE still make sense? Or am I shopping at the wrong place?

If you're only planning to have two drives in RAID1, it doesn't really matter whether they're PATA or SATA, as long as you put PATA drives on different channels. I've seen some claims that if you have two drives in software RAID1 (or part of a larger RAID5 array) as master/slave on the same IDE channel, the failure of one could conceivably cause data corruption on the other which sort of defeats the object of the exercise.

The 133MB/sec ATA133 "bottleneck" is a complete non-issue, as even if you could find some drives physically capable of saturating it (very unlikely), it's still faster than the speed of your network (even if you go for gigabit LAN). What's more, if you got SATA drives and attached them to a PCI adapter card, their transfer rate would in any case be theoretically limited by the bandwidth of the PCI bus, which would also have to be shared with the network adapter on your machine.

I think if I were you I'd just shop around and go for the best overall bang for the buck, regardless of SATA/PATA considerations...

edit: I've just realised I'm mostly repeating what's already been said... oh well, you get the point anyway...

Mar. · Post by **Mar.** » Sat Aug 20, 2005 8:13 am

We use Windows XP on our server, it works just fine for our purposes, and also allows the server to double as a living-room media center. We run MediaPortal on it.

Cams · Post by **Cams** » Sun Jan 08, 2006 2:10 am

IsaacKuo wrote:
Cams wrote:I would only need one optical drive so that would leave three IDE channels spare, one for OS and two for DATA. How would the master/slave thing best be configured?
I prefer eliminating the separate boot drive. It reduces the overall chances of a hard drive failure. It reduces noise, heat, and power draw. It improves performance because the boot drive is a big fast drive rather than some slower smaller drive. What's not to like?

Now that I'm getting closer to setting this server up, I was re-reading through this old thread and came upon this little nugget which I seem to have overlooked the first time around. I wonder if anyone would care to elaborate on this. I figured that it would be more data-secure to have the OS on its own drive, seperate from the data drives. Isaac suggests otherwise and I wondered why this should be.

Thanks
Cams

nick705 · Post by **nick705** » Sun Jan 08, 2006 3:31 am

I think really it's personal preference - I just think having the OS on it's own completely separate drive and keeping the array purely for data is a "neater" solution, and it seems more in line with the KISS approach... Isaac's way of spanning different logical layouts across all the disks seems to create a bit more complication and opportunity for data loss if something goes wrong. That's probably just me being paranoid though - I'm sure it's perfectly safe if it's set up properly, and it obviously cuts down on the number of physical drives you need.

/edit: re your last post in the other thread (might as well keep it all here)... plain old Debian stable itself (sarge) works fine as a server OS. I haven't installed it for a while, but IIRC it has an option for a "server" install (so does Debian-based Ubuntu for that matter)... or you could install the basic system, choose not to install any of the packages, and then just apt-get the things you want - Samba for filesharing, ssh for remote command-line administration and so on. Also maybe Webmin and/or SWAT if you want a web interface, although I've never bothered with it myself - setting up Samba for example from the command line and using a text editor is much less difficult than it's often cracked up to be...

I can't see why there should be any particular problems with using a Squeezebox... the server will just be another address on the network regardless of the OS it's running. As for running an email server, well, yes, by all means have a go, although for home use it seems a bit overkill...

arrikhan · Post by **arrikhan** » Sun Jan 08, 2006 4:01 am

Cams wrote:
Now that I'm getting closer to setting this server up, I was re-reading through this old thread and came upon this little nugget which I seem to have overlooked the first time around. I wonder if anyone would care to elaborate on this. I figured that it would be more data-secure to have the OS on its own drive, seperate from the data drives. Isaac suggests otherwise and I wondered why this should be.

Thanks
Cams

No idea myself. I run the smallest left over drive I can find for the OS (Linux) on a PII w/128MB RAM, and 3 other drives as large as I can, to drop MP3's (Itunes Client on HTPC in house), PVR Recordings, Emails, My Documents Directories for people in the house, anything to get data off of client PC's. That way, all rebuilds are clean and quick, including those in the house. OS failure on the fileserver, rebuild or get a new HD without having to care about the data drives. Basically it's a big NAS device (using Samba).

Oh .. it's also my Internet Gateway. The Linux PC is the Firewall/DHCP Server, FTP Server, WEB Server etc.. etc..

Secondly, your network is going to be your bottleneck with whatever you do over a network. Don't worry about speed/type of your HD's, unless you're using your server as a TV Tuner and dumping data onto it.

If you're just going to use it as a NAS (Network Attached Storage), don't worry about a GUI. There is very little you need running to manage the box and you won't need a monitor/kb/mouse etc.. you can just SSH or Telnet to it and use CLI ... (eek!)

Also, you can do all this with Windows too if you're not keen on Linux.

Laslty, put it in the garage !

My setup ...= Internet -> ADSL Modem -> Internet Gateway w/NAT on Linux Box and File Server -> Internal Network -> Multiple Windows Clients

If you want to actually do something more than store data on it, you have to start thinking about everything else the PC needs to do.. but from what I'm reading, you just want to store lots iof data on it yeah ! ?

Arrikhan

IsaacKuo · Post by **IsaacKuo** » Sun Jan 08, 2006 6:55 am

Cams wrote:
IsaacKuo wrote:I prefer eliminating the separate boot drive. It reduces the overall chances of a hard drive failure. It reduces noise, heat, and power draw. It improves performance because the boot drive is a big fast drive rather than some slower smaller drive. What's not to like?
I figured that it would be more data-secure to have the OS on its own drive, seperate from the data drives. Isaac suggests otherwise and I wondered why this should be.

I stated my reasoning within the above quote. With one less drive to fail, you've got one less drive to fail. It also reduces noise, heat, and power draw, and improves performance.

My file server has multiple drives, all of which are used for data. The boot drive has a small OS partition and a big data partition. All of the other drives simply have a single data partition.

I don't use RAID of any sort. It's all just plain simple data partitions. I prefer doing regular incremental backups with rsync rather than any sort of real-time RAID redundacy. It's simple, efficient, reliable, and cheap.

nick705 · Post by **nick705** » Sun Jan 08, 2006 8:33 am

IsaacKuo wrote: I don't use RAID of any sort. It's all just plain simple data partitions. I prefer doing regular incremental backups with rsync rather than any sort of real-time RAID redundacy. It's simple, efficient, reliable, and cheap.

ahh... my bad then in that case. For some reason, I had it in my head that you had a RAID array spanned across large partitions on each disk, with the OS and its pagefile (edit: I mean swap partition) taking up small partitions on the same physical disks.

I remember reading somewhere else here (it might actually have been a post by yourself) about having a small software RAID0 partition for the OS and a large RAID5 array for data both spanning the same physical disks, so that's probably where I got confused. With simple non-RAID partitions yes, there's not really much to be gained from having a separate boot disk apart from extra noise and heat.

My thinking behind having a separate boot drive was that although it's another drive to fail, the dedicated OS drive is relatively "disposable," and if the data drives were running in RAID5 it would be best to keep their logical layout as simple as possible in the event of any failure. Probably no big deal in any case though, admittedly...

Cams · Post by **Cams** » Sun Jan 08, 2006 9:33 am

Thanks for coming back, Isaac. Less heat and noise certainly makes sense, so I'll probably not use the 40 gig drive after all and get an external USB2 enclosure to use it and my other 40 gig drive for backups.

Any recommendations of a couple of large IDE drives for the server? Perhaps 5400 RPM drives would suffice? I guess they'd be hard to come by nowadays, particularly 250-300 gig varieties.

I've learned a lot from this thread and feel about ready to start the procedure. Just got to decide on what OS to run (or indeed no OS if I go with Clark Connect!)

Thanks once again
Cams

Tibors · Post by **Tibors** » Sun Jan 08, 2006 10:36 am

For my fileserver, I'm planning a disk configuration somewhat halfway between using a separate OS drive and putting the OS on the same drive as the data. I have a lot less data than you, so I can get away with three 80GB disks.

OS + disposable data, like CD-ROM images for my virtual CD-drive and software installers.
I can rip the CD's again, that costs about the same amount of time as restoring a back-up. For the sofware there probably is a new version I want by the time the drive fails.
Important data.
Back-up (in an external drive enclosure).

This keeps the benefit from putting the OS on a separate disk, as that disk is still disposable, but it doesn't have the negatives of extra noise and heat.

Kythe · Post by **Kythe** » Sun Jan 08, 2006 1:16 pm

I'm running a file server/print server at home using Linux, Samba and CUPS.

The system hardware is an old Dell Pentium 100 machine. The motherboard and processor and Power Supply are original, though the power supply was recently cleaned and the fan remounted using rubber grommets from Radio Shack.

The original hard drive (a 1 GB Quantum Fireball) was so loud that my wife was asking that the server be turned off at night -- and it was in another room! So now, I'm running everything off of a bungee-suspended WD800JB drive through a Promise ATA/100 controller: OS, swap and data (5 GB for the OS/swap, everything else for the data).

The system fan was replaced with a larger thermally-controlled fan, and the hard drive remounted from the drive bays (it's a mini-tower) to the bottom of the case in airflow.

After all of that, I added some acoustic absorption foam from McMaster-Carr.

The results of these mods have been a far quieter system (can't really tell it's on) and a much cooler hard drive (30-35 degrees Celsius). The main sources of noise, if you listen closely, are some minor power supply fan clicking and some pressure-induced buzzing from the new case fan. I could probably cut the case and give the case fan a better airflow path, but the system is so quiet now (and it's in a closed cabinet to boot) that I probably won't bother.

At this point, I'm not using RAID at all -- just counting on smartd to detect potential trouble and shut down the system

Oh, and that old 100 MHz pentium machine has enough power to serve files at a rate that maxes out my 804.11g network.

kesv · Post by **kesv** » Tue Jan 10, 2006 2:25 am

Kythe wrote: At this point, I'm not using RAID at all -- just counting on smartd to detect potential trouble and shut down the system

I hope you have backups, because by the time smartd detects a problem your data can already be corrupted. Also smart only predicts some 50-60% of possible failures.

Incremental backup like IsaacKuo describes is always good, even if you do have raid setup. There's a tool called rdiff-backup that uses the same algorithm as rsync but has more backup specific features. rdiff-backup recently reached version 1.0 so can be considered feature complete and stable. It has worked well for me.

teejay · Post by **teejay** » Tue Jan 10, 2006 11:19 am

For me personally, the big advantage of not using RAID is the ease with which I can swap disks around. I tend to do incremental upgrades to my system, so adding a disk at a time whenever I need it is a lot easier for me than shelling out for (say) 3 large drives. Also, if I end up with a noisy disk in my work rig it tends to migrate to my server "automatically"...

I use Rsync to safeguard my documents, photos and other stuff I don't want to lose... I sync my audio collection manually over my various machines and external disks since it had started to grow quite a bit since I started re-ripping to FLAC (Squeezebox, anyone? /me wants).

On the infrastructure side of things: I don't use my server rig for firewall/routing duties anymore. Everytime I brought my server down for further tinkering my internet connection went down as well (obviously) and that started to annoy me. So now I use a router/firewall that has the server on a separate VLAN (IP range) which allows me to route what little internet traffic comes in to my server (mostly HTTP for customer demo sites). All other machines share a VLAN, only the wireless part is behind a second firewall (since I don't trust wireless...)

Kythe · Post by **Kythe** » Tue Jan 10, 2006 7:45 pm

kesv wrote:
Kythe wrote: At this point, I'm not using RAID at all -- just counting on smartd to detect potential trouble and shut down the system
I hope you have backups, because by the time smartd detects a problem your data can already be corrupted. Also smart only predicts some 50-60% of possible failures.

Incremental backup like IsaacKuo describes is always good, even if you do have raid setup. There's a tool called rdiff-backup that uses the same algorithm as rsync but has more backup specific features. rdiff-backup recently reached version 1.0 so can be considered feature complete and stable. It has worked well for me.

The drive is pretty new, it's a fairly reliable model (WD800JB) and it's being babied, from a temperature standpoint. Still, you're right, and regular diff backups are in the near future.