[ale] INN server

[Dow Hurst]

Russell,
I don't know INN at all but had some thoughts on the thread:

Use a SGI Origin 3000 with XLV and XFS combined to span drives seamlessly and mirror.  If a drive fails you can restore easily while the mirror takes over.  Also, growing the filesystem is possible even while in use.  You could easily have thousands of drives.  I talked with an SGI engineer and found out you could have 1024 SCSI controllers on a fully decked out Origin 2000 (256 CPUs with 4 CPUs per node).  Maybe the Linux based LV system has a similar functionality, I don't know.  SGI specialized XFS and XLV to work on Terabyte size installations, you should take a look at it.  SGI has finally released XFS to the open source after purging it of the code that couldn't be included legally.  Either ReiserFS or XFS coupled with a logical volume management scheme would give you what you want in terms of a large file system worth using.  Being able to configure INN to access multiple filesystems for different groupings would certainly be a solution.  For that large a system, have you given thought to how long a fsck would take?  As long as you've got many small filesystems, you would have many parallel fscks running.  A single large ext2fs would take quite awhile!  I guess you would need two machines so you could backup and fsck one while the other provides services?  Each one of those ought to be mirrored, right?

I have been using ReiserFS on my laptop since last June with no problems and great success.  No wait times on boot for fsck's!  What hardware will you be using for your news server?
Dow


Dow Hurst
Systems Support Specialist
Chemistry Department
Kennesaw State University
770-499-3428 Office
770-423-6744 Fax
770-241-2015 Cellular
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