New Parts for My Beast

[CptCaveman]

Just ordered me some new parts for a replacement server. Just want to hear what you guys think of these parts for a NWSB 5.1 server. Doing just about every thing from mail hosting, print serving, file hosting, and now maybe even a little webaccess and be turned on with out slowing down things to badly.

Picked up a ....

KR7A-133raid board
2 - 40 gig Seagates
Amd 1900 XP
512 DDR 2100
2 - 3c905b cards
and then all the other basics cdrom, floppy, etc...

The thing it is replacing is some old p2 400 with 392 meg ram, 9gig scsi. old and slow.

So let the comments begain.

[MacGyver]

I'd put in more RAM if the board supports it, or at least leave yourself with a free slot so you can add more later. You can never have too much with Netware.

And I hope those hard disks are SCSI if the server is going to be handling a lot of things at once.

And I don't see a backup device in your list.........

[Cygnus]

Depends on your needs but, I like the convienience of removeable HDD bays.

[CptCaveman]

No Scsi this time I am thinking of giving IDE raid a chance. Went with some drives that have 8 meg buffers on them so I am hoping those will work. More ram is all ways nice to have I have noticed this. I am going with one stick of 512 ddr and still will have three open slots for later. Backup is going to be one of the hard drives setup with mirroring to start off with then I may pick one up for it. So far I have been lucky and never had to restore anything with the tape backup I have now. (knock on wood). Removeable drives are nice but once again I dont work for any thing that is mission critical so if the server ever goes down I can take the 5-10 minutes it takes to swap them out. Thanks guys.

[D@ve]

I have read a recent review of hard disks with a 8Mb buffer, they were rumoured to be faster than SCSI!

[PJPilate]

Hmmm, makes me think that my 486DX2 66Mhz running Netware 4.11 is kinda old huh? It only supports about 10 printers and 100 users, perhaps it *is* time to upgrade, since the corporate talking heads wants us to go all Active directory.... *shudder*

[MacGyver]

[quote]Originally posted by CptCaveman:
[QB]Backup is going to be one of the hard drives setup with mirroring to start off with then I may pick one up for it.[QB]<hr></blockquote>

Something you may want to note: we have about 12 Netware servers in our company, all of which use drive mirroring. Keep in mind that drive mirroring in Netware is SOFTWARE based. Well one day, one of the drives in a server crapped out. What is supposed to happen is that the other drive keeps on chugging, and the server sends out broadcast messages saying something is wrong. Well unfortunately, that didn't happen. The data on both drives were thoroughly thrashed, however the hardware itself was not damaged in any way. Fortunately we had the whole thing backed up on tape as well, or that particular office would have been up the creek! With this new event, we're left wondering if there's any point to mirroring drives anymore. With each additional drive in a server, it means more noise, more heat, and more money.

Drive mirroring is nice, but don't rely on it as your primary backup system. Also drive mirroring doesn't protect against the human element, ie somebody accidentally overwriting the wrong file. I restore one or two files off tape about twice a week for that exact reason.