Re: [school-discuss] Major Linux school deployments

[Michael Shigorin <mike@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 08:15:46AM -0700, Dean Montgomery wrote:
> * transfers about 1.5G per day for it's backup.

You could prune browser caches just before running that.
Probably 1/3 to 2/3 of changes might be shaved off.

> * takes 8 hours at night ( this is in parallel with 117 other
> schools, allot less time if it were on it's own )

Might be prudent to do something like staggered startup so that
disks at "that side" aren't thrashed to death before too long
(even SCSI/SAS have their limits).

> rsync scans each file and only sends the difference of the
> files.  rsync does not send files that already have been backed
> up.

It can also compress the data on the wire (-z), and if there
happen to be hardlinks, -H might help too (if these are unlikely
then better don't waste additional resources on that).

> Another benefit is uptime.  I've seen over 400 days uptime on
> the school servers.  We now shut them down during the summer so
> it is hard to tell how long they will actually run for.

Well uptime freaks might have suggested appending something like
"resume=/dev/ida/c0d0p2" (pointing to a swap partition) to kernel
command like and hibernating with "echo disk > /sys/power/state"
:)

BTW might still be worth to look whether the motherboard has
IPMI BMC [card], configure it and install/use ipmitool for
remote sensor monitoring and chassis management.

-- 
 ---- WBR, Michael Shigorin <mike@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  ------ Linux.Kiev http://www.linux.kiev.ua/