Re: VAR System Specs

["Aaron D. Turner" <aturner@best.com>]

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On Tue, 3 Nov 1998, Micah Yoder wrote:

> I *think* 256MB would be plenty.  But if they give us more, we won't
> complain.  :-)  You're right about the DB caching, but I think a little
> more disk activity isn't that big of a deal.  We won't be able to RAM
> cache it all anyway.
> 
> PostgreSQL doesn't take all that much memory.  At least not on my
> current test system, but it isn't being accessed very much.

The SCSI controller has 8MB ECC cache on it too.  OK sounds like we don't
need the RAM.

> > - ------
> > 20GB Disk (wow!)
> > 
> > Obviously if we don't do the RPM Repsotory mirror, we can reduce our disk
> > space requirements in half, so that would be the first thing we cut if VAR
> > can't give us that much.
> 
> Hmm.  That web page says there's 41Gig of stuff there, not 10! 

That's if you mirror the RPM's themselves.  We wouldn't need to do that.
Click on the "build your own mirror" link for more info.

> Actually, I wouldn't consider this essential at all.  It would just put
> more load on our server, taking away from the primary function.

Agreed, it's not essiential.  But it's not just a web front end to a FTP
site.  It allows you to do a lot of cool things like find out what the RPM
requires and what packages provide the dependancy.  Like I said, if we
couldn't get the disk space for it, we'd live without it.

> > And what about RAID?  We will get daily incrementals and weekly fulls
> > thanks to NaviSite.  Probably the best thing to do is ask for a spare disk
> > that we can restore data to in the event of a failure.  Also, if we need
> > 512MB of RAM, the lowest end server that supports that also comes with
> > RAID.
> 
> RAID would be nice if we can get it.  But hopefully we'll be mirroring
> to other machines, in which case one could be restored from the other.

I'm still not sure we can do this mirrored server thing.  It's not easy to
do right.  There's more than just the data-replication issues which are
difficult to do correctly.  It's also of questionable value.  One thing I
found out running the RHLUFAQ, is that people bookmark the site's homepage
and don't bother to do the same of the mirrors.  When the "main" site goes
down, they have no way of finding out what the URL is to the backup.
And unfortuenately DNS propagates far too slowly (I've made updates to my
company's zone files, and two weeks later people are still hitting the old
IP!)

Anyways, one of us is going to have to do some kind of feasibility study
to see what the benifit is and how much it will be to do.  There may be a
place for it that my poor brain can't comprehend right now.

[snip info on 1000 vs 3000]

> > Comments??  Am I asking for too much?
> 
> Yeeesh.... that stuff costs money!

If you think that's expensive, check out Sun's list price on their
equipment.  I was amused to read on Slashdot.org today that some guy took
140 Alphas to make the worlds 100th fastest super-computer, for the price
of a well equipped Sun Enterprise 5000. 

> Question:  If we get a VAR system, will that mean we don't do anything
> with NaviSite?  I thought VAR wanted it to be at their HQ.

No, VAR won't "force" us to use them as a ISP.  They were only offering
the bandwidth if NaviSite was charging us.

- -- 
Aaron Turner           | Either which way, one half dozen or another. 
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