[plug] Don't do that!

[Bernd Felsche]

The mainboard for PLUG's NNTP server arrived yesterday so I threw
all the bits together and started an install.

Two hard drives are in the box to facilitate mirroring by software
raid. Due to the way in which the software raid works, I had to set
up partitions on both drives and then identify them as RAID before
building a filesystem on them. I'm not mirroring swap, instead
assigning equal-priority swap partitions on both drives and letting
the kernel handle the striping.

I ended up with four filesystems on RAID1, /, /var, /home and /srv. 
6GB, 10GB, 10GB and 30GB respectively.  The rest of the space from
the two '80GB' discs has been allocated to /scratch, unmirrored and
under LVM.

Once I started installation, booting off a USB stick and using media
on the server, I noted the error of my ways.  Each md driver
commenced mirror recovery to the second drive.  Fortunately, the
drivers noticed that they were about to collide on the bus and
kindly waited for another to complete.  There was no deadly embrace
so it all sort of worked; very slowly; over 10 hours!

Load averages were in excess of 6 with 98% IO wait.

In part, that's due to the single IDE channel with master and slave
mirroring.

A "normal" SuSE install takes about an hour with server-type options
selected; as I did. I should have installed a minimal system and let
the RAIDs "rebuild" before trying to install the fruit.

Still; it's been a good test of the hardware. The drives are getting
a bit hot for my liking so I'll do some hacking of the ventilation;
and the CPU fan is annoyingly noisy; not really loud, but has a
distinctive resonance. I might remove it altogether and plumb in a
duct from the heatsink to a larger, quiet housing fan.

The front panel has a pretty blue light... I'll leave the hardware
hack to modulate its brightness according to load to somebody else.
:-)

I'd planned to build leafnode2 on the box last night but ran out of
hours. My plan is to have a proof of concept for the NNTP server
running on my LAN by next week, so that I can point my personal
leafnode server at it and read/post "PLUG" articles.

-- 
/"\ Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia
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