Computer Surgery Needed

Well, new years went well, a quiet evening at home watching such classic movies as Trading Spaces and Flesh Gordon Meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders (a very strange movie indeed).


Today was fine, hung out at home a bit looking at the new Gentoo 1.4 rc2 release and ended up heading to see The Two Towers (again) with Cat5 and my friend Sean. All good, and came home to a great meal and more cheesy movies in the form of Wing Commander (a horrible movie if you ask me).


I was going to do some computer surgery but it’s a bit late now, maybe tomorrow night. I’m thinking of re-installing my main system, and possibly creating a RAID filesystem just for fun. However, my current case doesn’t have room for one more drive, so I was going to swap it with the nifty case that naked is currently in from Cat5, which has gobs of room for hard drives and fans (which I have plenty of). I may end up just moving drives around a bit and putting all my file storage somewhere shared, who knows. I have a 40, a 20, another 40, and now an 80 (geez…. 180G of storage…. if someone had told me a year ago I’d have that much I’d have told them they were crazy, no one can use that much space!


Now the question is, how to best configure my setup? I was thinking something like this: the two 40’s, plus a 40G partition of the 80 as a RAID5 array to do “file storage and software backup” <g> (giving me approximately 80G of storage… sucks to lose the extra 40G to the parity), use the remaining 40G of the 80 as system, and the 20 as /home, keeping the 10G or so for a windows gaming partition somewhere in there.


Anyone have any bright ideas? Raid isn’t strictly needed of course, but cool to have 🙂 I could just set all the drives up as a RAID0 (striping) and create one huge disk!


Tomorrow it’s back to work though, gym in the morning, and then working on that work thing. A meeting I had with the boss man of the ASP project on the 31st went well, but found out that the module that we had finished up for the evaluation system apparently is nothing like the HR department wanted, but is exactly what the person who is our contact there wanted. sigh After about three hours of talking about it we decided that if we couldn’t figure it out we had better let them tell us what they want. Of course, they haven’t actually done it yet, even in theory it sounds like, so even they don’t have a clue. The authentication part of things needs to be finished up however, so I’m going to be working full speed ahead on that.


No new years resolutions this year, not that I’ve had them in years past. I’m already on my way to better health and a better waistline, work seems to be going well, and we’re not out on the street yet, so money is surviving. I’d like to go on holiday next year sometime though, which will require a bit extra to come in, but hopefully this contract I’ve taken will give a leg up on that. Lets see, I think that covers things as far as the standard resolutions go…


I see silv has also forgone the standard resolutions this year, and instead chosen to write a small novel about how things are going for him and his new focus(es). Good luck with everything in the new year dude. And good luck and wishes to all my family and friends and readers and cats as well.

3 Comments on “Computer Surgery Needed”

  1. File storage and backup? I don’t think that is good use of a RAID. I would rather make 3 or 4 drives of 20GB and use that for your critical files. IE data, home, etc. Then you can the other disks for backups, etc. This would leave you with 40GB of RAID5 with a spare disk and still leave you with 60GB for misc (ie windows).
    IMHO anyways.;)

  2. I like the RAID 5 idea for “storage + backups” as then you don’t have such a critical need to run backups all the time…
    Why not make one box (naked?) just a pure server? storage and some services(arcterex.net perhaps?) that could sit behind a dedicated firewall… ‘course I don’t know how you’re set up now, so this may be redundant info 🙂

  3. Derf – agreed I think. RAID should be for what you dont’ want to loose. Of course, I don’t really want to loose anything 🙂 The / is most loosable, with /home/ being least, and something like mp3 storage being a PITA to loose, but not much more.
    Striping across a bunch of disks is bad (IMO) as then you have the danger of blowing everything away if one goes, so that’s out. 3x80G in a RAID5 array for / and /home, or have it as a drive in /mnt/ somewhere that has /home and /var/ftp etc on it. Who knows 🙂
    Cat5 – A central server is good of course, but then there are things like having network lag for copying large amounts of data around, ie: from a windows/kazaa session or something instead of right from HD to HD (assuming a dual boot box). There’s also the issue of CPU, naked isn’t the speediest box in the world, but at this point, doesn’t need to be. A p2-300 (with no fan on the CPU btw) works just dandy to do the three functions it does, web, squid, and ssh. Throwing more and more duties would increase load on the box, etc etc.
    Of course, I’d probably have no objection to throwing 3×80 in there as a dedicated storage array however, that is something I’ve been planning to do for a while, just never got around to it.