[GRLUG] Raid, LVM, and Cheap Storage

Tue Oct 14 12:54:10 EDT 2008

On Tue, 2008-10-14 at 08:39 -0400, Bruce Smith wrote:
> >> > Only blown filesystem
> >> > I've ever had was a ReiserFS - that was simple, don't use ReiserFS.
> >> Maybe Hans can fix that, if they let him have a computer in his cell.
> >> He'll definitely have lots of free time, for the rest of his life!  ;-)
> > I think time has passed by for ReiserFS anyway.  ext3 now supports
> > indexed directories, there is tmpfs, even XFS is improved...
> Why does SuSE still have ReiserFS as their default FS?
> That's just annoying.  I wish they'd change that!

?? I'm pretty sure the default has changed,  it is now ext3.  Boring,
and safe, like a default should be.

> And let me also take a jab at Ubuntu for equal time:
> Why does Ubuntu not allow the /boot partition to be XFS (saying the
> system may not boot)?  [Open]SuSE doesn't care, and I've never had a
> problem booting off a XFS partition w/grub!

Wierd, maybe it is Debian hold-over?  Debian people are crazy,  seems
like they occasionally find some obscure thing to be uber-conservative
about,  and then they just won't let go.

I wonder why "noatime,data=writeback" isn't the default for workstations
and laptops.  It is noticeably faster and adds ~15 minutes to my battery
life.  Even the kernel devs recommend it.  At lease "noatime" for
crying-out-loud.

> >> VMware is great for combining old hardware, especially servers with
> >> low resource requirements (like Linux firewalls).
> > I've consolidated servers with high resource requirements. :)  So far
> > I'm nothing but impressed regarding performance; part because even
> > "busy" servers spend a fair amount of time idle and current servers have
> > *8* cores...
> I moved about a dozen low-resource servers (firewalls, routers, DNS
> servers, ftp server, mrtg, etc.) into one VMware ESXi server, along
> with a couple resource hogs (OpenNMS, OOo for thin clients), and it
> still has plenty of power to spare.
> It'll be interesting to see how many virtual machines I squeeze onto
> that VM server.

A guy at OLF said he had 39 VMs on one box,  two and a half racks of
equipment down onto a single 3U box.   