Rod -
I want to clear up some terminology confusion. You refer to "[your] main
app (a MS database)" and elsewhere you talk about an .MDB file. When you're
working with MS Access in a networked environment, there's no central app -
there's a central database (the .MDB file) and the app or apps run
distributed (that is, on the "client side), even if the app files themselves
(Access itself plus any macros, VB code, whatever) are stored centrally. If
you were using SQL Server instead of or in addition to Access, the SQL
Server app and the database would reside centrally and your client-side apps
(possibly to include Access) would connect to SQL Server (perhaps via ODBC
or some other mechanism). So, if I understand you correctly, it's your
database or database file (the .MDB file) that was moved to another
machine.
The good thing about your situation is that the common components of your
database arrangement - which are nothing but files - can be hosted on
Samba/Linux with few if any issues.
You indicate that you want to have a backup server that performs no other
duties. Given that you still need a file server, you're talking about
having two servers, which strikes me as a little wasteful. In lieu of that,
why don't you consider making a file server which itself can be backed up to
tape? Then, you can train your usership to store their important
information only on the file server, where it could be backed up to tape
regularly. You can even design the Windows client environment to make that
be the default way of working (i.e., set the WordPerfect default directory
to point to the user's home directory on the file server).
Personally, I consider it a challenge to work with a given pile of junk.
You may learn, as I did, that even castoff crap can be set up to work
effectively. Besides, it teaches humility and economy.
I think that you should concentrate your resources on your file server. It
should have the best motherboard - not necessarily the best processor,
although that should be a factor too. It should have the most memory and,
if you only have one 10/100 Ethernet card, that's where it should go. The
file server needs to have RAID, even if only in software. That means that
you will probably need at least three drives (I don't know if you can boot
off a software RAID partition under Linux yet). If you don't have a lot of
drives lying around (and your server is likely to only be able to handle
four IDE drives, tops) but you have a slight budget, you might try trolling
for a SCSI controller and an old SCSI array. A single 13GB drive, in terms
of file servers, isn't as useful as five 2GB drives even though a RAID 5
array of five 2GB drives will give you less space (~8GB). Microseconds ,
SMS, or some other similar outfit may be able to find you an array of some
kind.
Two reasons to go SCSI are that 1) IDE taxes CPU more, and your file server
will have the busiest disks in the office 2) It's my understanding that
having more than one drive per IDE controller more than takes away any
performance advantage RAID can give you. While I don't think you can
hot-swap out a failed drive under software RAID (I think hot-swapping is the
exclusive domain of hardware RAID), if your RAID drives are in an external
array, it might be a cleaner operation to go in and swap a drive out.
Expect a server drive to fail!
You should put the tape drive on the server, of course, and you can use a
commercial backup product, the utilities that come with Linux distros, or
clever shell scripts plus cron to handle the backups.
Here are some cool things you could try:
* If you already have Symantec Ghost or something similar for the
Windows machines, use the Linux/Samba server to hold the resulting disk
image files from each client machine. Don't do what a lot of people try to
do - using the same Ghost image file on more than one machine, even if the
machines appear identical (they very likely will not). You probably won't
have the disk space to hold everyone's Ghost images, but that's why you have
a tape drive, right? This will allow you to quickly and decisively restore
a Win98 client machine to a known good state in case its drive breaks or the
machine gets ILOVEYOUed or otherwise hosed.
* If you use your Linux/Samba server to hold a networked installation
of Access, Wordperfect, etc. or any other big file that people read-access a
lot AND your server has a lot of RAM, you might improve launch time with a
cron job that periodically cats the file(s) to nowhere (/dev/null). This
should cause the file(s) to go into cache and the next time someone tries to
launch the app, it will come out of cache and not the disk - it'll come out
of cache a lot faster than it will come out of a disk. This trick may be
superfluous if the files/apps are read fairly often, because in that case
they will tend to stay cached anyway. "Back in the day" when we were
running Banyan VINES on 386/16 servers (1989ish), the first poor schlub that
tried to launch Wordstar or WRQ Reflection in the morning was the only one
who had to wait for the drives to churn. At my previous employer, I had two
old SCSI arrays hooked up to a PII/333 I had built and set up under NT (at
the time, I didn't have enough Linux 'fu to confidently use Samba and I was
in a hurry, okay?), and even though the drives were tremendously old and
clunky, reads that came out of cache were quite fast. If I had been using
Linux/Samba, the effect would probably been more pronounced because under
Linux, I can pull stunts like cat xxxx > /dev/null automatically and reduce
my system memory usage.
- Jeff
-----Original Message-----
From: Rod Young [mailto:">development@combiz.net]
Sent: Friday, May 12, 2000 8:56 AM
To: ">rob@frankenlinux.com; ">ale@ale.org
Subject: Re: [ale] samba backup server part 2
-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Hoffman ">rob@frankenlinux.com ">rob@frankenlinux.com> >
To: ">ale@ale.org ">ale@ale.org> ">ale@ale.org ">ale@ale.org> >;
Rod Young ">development@combiz.net ">development@combiz.net> >
Date: Thursday, May 11, 2000 10:58 PM
Subject: Re: [ale] samba backup server part 2
>Rod,
>
>I'm a little unclear as to what you are after.
Due to system instabiltiy(98 system files disappearing) My main app(a MS
database) has been moved another machine. Eventally I want to migrate the
database. But I will fight that battle another day or year.
>What is it exactly that you want to do with wordperfect and where are your
*.mdb files now?
We are a wordperfect office. So I can still use it on the cyrix if I
converted it to linux. I am just trying to figure out what use we could use
this machine for. Since it has a colorado T3000 ( i know SLOW) I thought we
could use it or the large hard drive to back everyone else up. Everyone else
has just 3gigs.
>Using the machine as a file server and backup server are two very different
things. Which are you trying to do? (if either) I really like to maintain a
separate backup server that has no other duties.
>
>Linux doesn't have a problem with 13 BG drives; I'm running on a 30 GB
drive right now. If you have some old machine, your bios may not recognize
the 13 BG drive.
The wierd part is that the bios autodetects at 13gigs! 98 just won't format
higher than eight. Originally when I added the 13gig I ghosted over a 3 gig
backup. The new drive was formatted at 8 but went to 13 afterwards.
Unfortunately that was a few crashes/reinstalls ago. I no longer have that
image and I am back down to 8 gigs.
There are two ways around this: See if there's a bios update for your
motherboard that recognizes 13 GB harddrives. If there isn't, make a boot
disk during your Linux install and start up the computer using it each time
(make a backup bootdisk with the command 'mkbootdisk' after you get it
going... that way, you have a spare.) My workstation at my last job needed a
bootdisk to get going because it was an old, crappy cyrix machine and I
stuck a 10 GB drive in it.
>
>You might try setting up a /boot partition of about 15 meg during install
which may save you the hastles of boot disks. It may work and it may not.
Either way, as a non-profit org who can't be choosy, using a boot disk on a
machine that only has to be restarted after a power failure shouldn't be
that painful.
There seems to be a consensus (all bad) about cyrix. Does linux preform well
on it?
--
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