File Server and Raid

[Johan Ramm-Ericson]

On Thu, November 16, 2006 15:39, Richard Brown wrote:
> Hi Everyone
>
> On 15/11/06, Paul Schmidt <pschmidt at lazytechs.com> wrote:
>> Johan Ramm-Ericson wrote:
>> This worked quite well for me, and was the most straight forward answer
>> I found for setting up a raid for linux.
>>
> Having now read the published links I now understand that I might be
> talking and looking at the wrong answer.
>
> The file server I was talking about is not that important to need
> raid. I think for me what is more important is the ability to backup.
> I am now thinking that what would be better would be a separate
> machine that would be a backup system.

OK. This is an important discovery - understanding what it is you _really_
need to accomplish is what will make you build a great system. As a side
note - even with a RAIDed system you should be taking backups - as someone
pointed out earlier today or yesterday in a different thread. It can't be
said too many times so I'll repeat myself: take backups!

> I have two boxes available to me at the moment. An Athlon 64 and a
> Pentium 4. What I intend to do is run the Athlon as a file server at
> the moment and run the Pentium as a backup. I also have a Mac that
> would need to access the file server.

If the Mac is a Mac OS X system then you can use Samba or NFS to share
files to it. It it is pre-OS X then you will need the netatalk package.

Read more on NFS sharing here:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SettingUpNFSHowTo

Read more on Samba sharing here:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SettingUpSamba

Read more on netatalk / AppleTalk here:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AppleTalk

> If I was to do the above what would I need to do please? I presume
> setting up the Athlon box is quite simply following the instructions
> on the Ubuntu site. The backup system would need to be always
> available to the file server to back-up on.

Well, not necessarily. Change your perspective and you can look at it like
this: "The file server needs to be available most of the time (always?). I
need to backup regularly (once a day?), so my backup server needs to be
available to initiate backups within the schedule I set."

> What do folks think and is there a good resource for reading more
> about backup servers please? Do I need to use the alternative disk or
> server disk for either of these?

There are any number of ways to backup your system - and as many opinions
about it and different ways to do it as there are geeks (trying hard to
avoid another flame war here :-)

This may be a good starting point:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BackupYourSystem

HTH,
Johan