[Samba] A probably silly thought but...

[Denis Vlasenko]

On Friday 04 March 2005 00:30, Matthew Western, IT Support, Lonsdale wrote:
> Not a silly thought.    
> 
> I've instead of spending x hunderd thousand on brandname ibm servers and
> sans, how you could create a RAID array of PCs running IDE hard drives.
> If a PC dies just plug in some more and rebuild.   If you want to add
> more space just add more PCs.  :)      that would be cool.

Network block device + dm.
 
> Obviously you wouldn't use it still for critical data like databases
> etc, but our user directory would be a good candidate.     
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> [snip]
> > > at the moment i'm using rsync twice a day to sync about 2TB amount 
> > > of data between two hardware raids (both raid5 with 2 hot spare)
> > >
> > > advantage: if filesystem is corrupt on one raid, the other raid is 
> > > normaly not affected

This is the recipe for high reliability:
* RAID5 protects you from hardware failure
* backup protects you from human error/kernel bugs

One of your RAIDs is effectively a backup.
You don't really need to store it on the RAID tho,
unless you want to be protected from *simultaneous* hw failure
on both machines. Very unlikely. You can keep backup on plain ol' disk.
--
vda