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Grex > Oldcoop > #380: Cyberspace Communications finances for November 2006 | |
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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 124 responses total. |
mary
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response 64 of 124:
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Dec 19 20:53 UTC 2006 |
Do we want to invest any money in non-rack mounted hardware?
If we ever wanted to move to another location we'd pretty much
need to fit in standard rack space.
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nharmon
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response 65 of 124:
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Dec 19 21:28 UTC 2006 |
This is an internal drive array, Mary.
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keesan
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response 66 of 124:
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Dec 19 21:42 UTC 2006 |
I think we should fix the mail problem before investing in more hardware, and
put back newuser. Why spend money on grex if it is going to evaporate?
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mcnally
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response 67 of 124:
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Dec 19 22:09 UTC 2006 |
re #65: If it's built to fit into a tower case it's almost certainly
not going to fit into a rack-mount chassis.
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maus
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response 68 of 124:
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Dec 20 00:41 UTC 2006 |
If the rack case can accommodate 3 CDRom drives (all the ones 3U or
taller that I have seen can), then this will fit just fine. Technically,
we could get by with mounting the drives directly in drive slots in the
chassis, but then we would lose hot-plug capabilities. It ill fit into
any case that has three adjacent externally accessible 5.25 inch drive
bays (so a space 4.8 inches by 5.25 inches approximately).
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maus
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response 69 of 124:
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Dec 20 00:52 UTC 2006 |
resp:66 Keesan, I think the storage issue is orthogonal to the spam
issue, and in some ways, I think the additional space would help, since
if we moved /var and our equivalent of /home onto the new drives, they
would not fill up as easily, thereby preventing the potential DOS from
overflowing /var.
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keesan
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response 70 of 124:
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Dec 20 01:39 UTC 2006 |
Why not just prevent the spam from coming in instead of finding a place to
store it? Or at least get rid of all unused accounts, to start with.
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mcnally
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response 71 of 124:
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Dec 20 02:08 UTC 2006 |
re #70:
> Why not just prevent the spam from coming in instead of finding
> a place to store it?
We've answered this question time and time and time again -- why should
you expect us to answer it again just because you don't like the answers?
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nharmon
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response 72 of 124:
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Dec 20 03:40 UTC 2006 |
> If it's built to fit into a tower case it's almost certainly not going
> to fit into a rack-mount chassis.
If we moved to a rack mountable chassis, we would have to get one that
had enough 5.25" bays for the drive array. I have no experience with
putting PC hardware into a rack mountable chassis, so I would defer to
maus's expertise.
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maus
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response 73 of 124:
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Dec 20 06:19 UTC 2006 |
Most 3U and 4U chassis will accommodate this drive cage. If we want to
skip the cage and just put the drives directly into the server chassis
in the internal 3.5 inch slots, we can, but I recommend against doing
so, since we would lose hot-plug capabilities, and because the cage is
designed with the thermal characteristics of four drives in mind and
mitigates or dissipates the heat generated by running the four drives.
If we can give up hot-plug and if we want to do some air-flow
engineering of our own then go ahead and skip the cage, just make sure
that thermal damage does not void the warranty of the drives.
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maus
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response 74 of 124:
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Dec 20 06:26 UTC 2006 |
Keesan, I agree that something needs to be done about the spam, but a
total 100% solution is probably not feasible, and the problem of spam
does not negate the fact that we need reliable, capacious storage.
If negating spam is your top priority, perhaps you could donate
something like
http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/products/spam_overview.php for Grex
to use.
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spooked
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response 75 of 124:
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Dec 20 12:02 UTC 2006 |
*MANY* solutions exist today, before-your-eyes on the Internet which could
easily catch 95%+ of incoming spam into the Grex mail server. They could
be implemented quickly by any staff member with half-a-degree of
intelligence.
Unfortunately, Grex is so backward and naive (did I mention
anti-progressionary?) that it (in particular its staff) will find any
excuse not to move forward from its ancient software and system
architecture base.
So glad I resigned from those cronies.
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nharmon
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response 76 of 124:
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Dec 20 13:01 UTC 2006 |
You don't seem glad.
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spooked
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response 77 of 124:
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Dec 20 13:11 UTC 2006 |
*giggles* Thanks for the light amusement :)
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mary
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response 78 of 124:
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Dec 20 13:22 UTC 2006 |
The reason I bring up the rack-mount issue is I believe we'll
someday need to fit into the smallest space possible at some
other location than Provide. When we moved from the Pumpkin,
to Provide, we were very lucky Provide had the space and inclination
to allow our hardware to occupy a footprint outside of their racks.
Every other affordable ISP I contacted wanted us in a rack and charged
for service based on the amount of rack space (and bandwidth) used.
I would really like to see space considerations made part of any
hardware decisions we make at this point. So, thanks for all
the information on this.
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ric
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response 79 of 124:
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Dec 20 13:34 UTC 2006 |
I don't know of any spam fighting systems that are easily implemented thta
actually eliminate 95% of spam without also blocking desired email.
Even greylisting, and using all sort of DNS blacklists, does *NOT* reduce my
spam intake by 95% on my server, and I even use some mroe aggresive DNS
blacklists like spamcop.
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nharmon
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response 80 of 124:
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Dec 20 14:00 UTC 2006 |
I understand and appreciate the need to keep our physical footprint as
small as possible. If we needed to put Grex into a rack mountable case
right now, we would need one that was at least 3U to accommodate the PC
components that were used to build Grex (Rack space is measured in U's,
with each U being about 1.75 inches).
http://www.directron.com/ra349c00300w.html
This is a 3U rack chassis that would accommodate Grex's present
motherboard and cards as well as two of the drive cages that maus is
proposing.
If we wanted to venture into 2U or 1U territory we would be looking at a
complete system repurchase, and we might even have to get 2.5" (read:
laptop) hard drives in the case of a 1U solution. And laptop hard drives
are NOT cheap, nor as reliable, nor as spacious, as 3.5" drives.
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maus
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response 81 of 124:
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Dec 20 20:22 UTC 2006 |
I like that chassis you showed. And anything smaller than 3U would
require a reengineering. Laptop hard drives are not standard for a 1U
chassis, but you would be limited to two or three normal-sized drives,
which means putting all of our eggs into one basket (in performance as
well as redundancy). If we only had 2U of space, what we could do is put
just our system drives into the host and data drives into a separate
drive shelf.
An alternate solution might be to find out if our ISP offers a managed
SAN option. in this case, we would simply pay the monthly fee instead of
amortizing out a the cost of installing this storage equipment
ourselves. At worst, we would have to buy a gigabit NIC and an initiator
programme (though I have heard that the initiator programme from NetBSD
can be ported to OpenBSD with little work).
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aruba
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response 82 of 124:
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Dec 20 23:15 UTC 2006 |
maus - thanks a lot for your work on this. Your RFQ looks very
professional. I just want to make sure it doesn't commit us to anything,
if we get a bid. Going forward with a RAID array will require some time to
get the board and staff on board, so I don't want you to be annoyed if we
get a quote and then sit on it for a while. I hope we'll discuss it in
depth soon, but the process of agreeing on what we want and then the
logistics of the changeover may be much more elaborate than the actual
purchase.
Here is Grex's current case:
http://www.antec.com/pdf/drawings/PLUS1080AMG.pdf
It has room for 8 5.25 drives. I tend to agree with Mary, though, that we
should think in terms of rack mounting in the future.
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cross
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response 83 of 124:
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Dec 21 00:07 UTC 2006 |
I think it's reasonable to look at 3U as a lower bound on space required.
Regarding #51; The thing about ccd or the like is that you can't boot off of
it. I'd be less worried about a controller going bad and more worried about
having a good hot-swappable disk system.
Regarding #55; I agree, we need to make things as simple as possible. I
further agree that an SATA RAID solution really looks promising for grex.
Regarding #56; RAID-5 *does* have multiple spindles, but they're all required
for reads and writes. Something like RAID 0+1 would be a better fit for grex,
I think.
With respect to spam and newuser ... You need a decent foundation to build
off of.
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maus
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response 84 of 124:
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Dec 21 00:36 UTC 2006 |
I would like to have one of our Legal Weasels read over the RFQ and make
sure it does not obligate us to anything. I think we should also wait
before sending it to the vendors until we get a commit from the board
that we will start the selection process as soon as the deadline clicks,
and time it so that the deadline is something like a week before a BOD
meeting so that we could decide on it fairly quickly. We should probably
have a stanza in there that says something to the effect of "we will
notify vendors within *** days of our decision".
Should we have a standardized worksheet for RFQs so that in the future
if we need gear over a certain dollar amount (maybe arbitrarily over
400$ or something), we can just fill in a few blanks and email it off?
Also, who would be the recipient both for bids and for
questions/clarifications?
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maus
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response 85 of 124:
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Dec 21 00:40 UTC 2006 |
Cross, I know, ccd is only for a data volume, such as /var/www or
something that needs to be big without needing super performance. If you
need big and performance, RAID 1+0 is your friend.
I still think we should use the new RAID for our equivalent of /home and
/var and have the system on the existing SCSI drives (maybe using
RAIDFrame (the software RAID) to mirror two system drives).
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keesan
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response 86 of 124:
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Dec 21 02:11 UTC 2006 |
Ric, what percentage of spam do you eliminate? Remmers, when do you expect
to have something set up for people to use who are averse to copying over two
files and changing the login name and want a script to do it for them?
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cross
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response 87 of 124:
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Dec 21 03:02 UTC 2006 |
Regarding #85; Personally, I'd like to see the entire system on hot-swappable
media: both the user data, and the operating system. We had an occassion
where the root filesystem got lost once, and grex was down for at least
several days. If that filesystem had been RAIDed, we could have avoided that
downtime. I don't believe you can boot fram RAIDframe, either, which implies
that the root filesystem cannot be as redundant as we'd (perhaps) like.
I'm in favor of moving to a rack mount case with the storage system you
proposed, and disposing of the SCSI disks. Perhaps selling them and the SCSI
controller would be a way to offset the cost --- at least partially --- of
getting this new hardware.
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maus
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response 88 of 124:
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Dec 21 04:59 UTC 2006 |
If I remember correctly, the way you do it is to make every filesystem
except / on software RAID and make an identical copy of / on the first
slice of the second drive, so no, it is not fault tolerant live, but if
you cannot boot from the normal /, then you just issue your boot command
to bring you up on the alternate copy of /. Things could have changed,
though, since I have not done RAIDframe-based RAID in a while, mostly
relying on 3ware boards for mirroring Serial ATA or IDE drives, and LSI
or Adaptec boards for mirroring SCSI drives.
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