[olug] LVM, journaling fs, and high availability?

[Phil Brutsche]

Eric Penne wrote:
 > Reading /. made me think about LVM which I know nothing about.
 >
 > If I were to make a high availability server (ie mail, web, DNS,
 > etc.) and was following the practice of one server process (apache)
 > per server and I wanted maximum uptime, would it make sense to use
 > journaling filesystems and LVM?  Is journaling and LVM made for this
 > type of task?  I'm not worried about system load, I'll overkill on
 > that to get good life from a PC.

It depends on your needs.  For a DNS server journalling is nice but not
needed, and an LVM setup would be considered bloat unless the server in 
question does more than just DNS traffic.  Even RAID can be considered 
overkill for a DNS server, since your redundancy is easily taken care of 
by having multiple machines.

 > In my head I'm thinking, email server for 100 users with Pentium 4
 > and 2 40GB hard drives in raid for redundancy and 4GB of RAM.  I
 > would want a server that I can set up and never worry about (except
 > security holes).

Now THAT is something that LVM is good for.  Don't ever assume that 40GB 
of storage will be enough ;)

Depending on the current (or future) user load on that mail server a 
mirrored pair of 40GB IDE drives may prove to be a bottleneck.

 > I > want the P4 because I know it will handle the load for the next
 > 8+ years. I choose a lot of hard drive space because I don't want to
 > run out of space.  I choose raid because it one drive dies I want the
 > other one to just take over and run until I can get there to fix it.
 > Hardware that won't ever be the weak point.
 >
 > What other things should I be thinking about?

Hardware will ALWAYS have a weak point.

Memory, motherboards, NICs, RAID cards, and power supplies are thing's 
I've had to replace ;)

 > I don't know if this rambling made sense but hopefully somebody can
 > pick up on my jumbled train of thought.

-- 

Phil Brutsche
phil at brutsche.us