On Thu, May 10, 2007 at 12:03:44PM -0700, John Brahy wrote:
quoted text
> Hello List,
> 
> We're the proud new owner of a 10x750GB appliance. We're going to put
> OpenBSD on it and I was looking for suggestions or feedback on a
> configuration we were considering. This server is going to be stored at our
> colo and we have a point to point T1 directly connected to it. (We're going
> to initially populate it here and only have to rsync daily differences after
> hours.) 
> 
> Luca-Brozzi.ad2.com
> ---------------------
> 
> Partition	Size(GB)
>  /			2
>  swap			8
>  /usr			4
>  /usr/local		4
>  /usr/obj		4
>  /usr/src		4
>  /var			2
>  /home		20
>  /tmp			2
>  /backups/server1	400
>  /backups/server2	400
>  /backups/server3	400
>  /backups/server4	400
>  /backups/server5	400
>  /backups/server6	400
>  /backups/server7	400
>  /backups/server8	400
>  /backups/server9	400
> 
> 
> Is this the best way to do it? Does anyone have suggestions on a better way
> to do it?

It really depends. The volume manager crowd have a point in that a
volume manager can make it easier to do this sort of thing (supporting
really large filesystems would work as well, but that's still being
worked on).

However, quite a few backup systems will happily stripe the backups
across as many disks as you feed them; AMANDA can certainly do this,
although it's not really a good fit for filesystem-based backups. I'd be
wary of the 'one disk per server' method you use above, though; that's
not likely to be a good map in the future. You might even want to
consider mounting ~ 2TB ccds under, say, /disks and symlinking
/backups/server1, ... to those, mostly for psychological reasons.

You might want to consider various variants on RAID, too. This depends
on the uptime requirements, obviously, but if this is the only place
you'll store backups, you'll want to make sure a simple disk failure
doesn't cause too much trouble.

Otherwise, your non-backup directories are ridiculously large, but
that's not really going to hurt you in this case, and taking this much
storage offline for repartitioning would be painful.

		Joachim

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