[Samba] big file server #2

[Thierry ITTY]

Hi

just to tell...

a while ago I asked about making a big file server. the main goal is to
have a cheap box with ca. 1 TB.
I decided to go with the following :
- PIV 2,4 GHz, 512 MB DDR 333
- mobo gigabyte w/ i845PE
- additional IDE card w/ 2 ATA (gives me 8 devices max)
- 1 40/60 GB disk for system
- 5 200 GBs disk for data

- RH 9.0 OOTB over sgi-xfs 1.2 install
- soft raid 0
- xfs
- samba
- nfs
- accton 10/100 NIC

hardware had to be standard, common, available, thus the choices

i wanted one flat TB so h/w raid was not an option (i could not spread one
raid system over 2 boards ; maybe i could have set 2 h/w raid systems, one
w/ 2 disks and one w/ 3 disks, and flatten it with an lvm, but it looked
hairy...) so I choosed s/w raid

with raid0 i could get a disk write throughtput of ca. 50 MB/s, whereas
raid0 only gave 15

i found that overall performance was a little better w/ md devices vs. lvm
devices, so i definitely choosed s/w raid 0

i tried ext3, xfs and reiserfs and went for xfs (best performances,
supports ea/acl ...)

i had to tune the disk io subsystem (mainly w/ bios and hdparm) very
carefully. w/ default settings the average throughput was as bad as 2 MB/s
whereas a fine tuning gave me 25 times more !

TODO 
i'm trying ethernet bonding (not very successful at the moment - help and
advice appreciated !) because i'll need at least 2/300 Mbps network
throughput, or i'll try a GB card

thanks for those who advised me, and thanks to those who will :-)