[aprssig] Re: FindU Maps Quirky

[James Jefferson Jarvis]

Jason and SIG,

(I cc'ed the message to the SIG to potentially save some typing on future 
messages)

On Monday 07 February 2005 16:09, you wrote:
> > Machine needs to run Linux and have software RAID setup.
> Linux, or just unix?

If I'm maintaining it then it has to run Debian Linux. If you are maintaining 
it and don't need me to ever touch it then run it on whatever you can get 
PHP4 + Mapscript + my software to run on.

Note: I've used a lot of *nixes in the past 8 years. A few I've really liked 
(Irix & Linux) and a few I don't like too much (SCO and HPUX). But I just 
don't have the interest to have system administration things be different 
between machines and deal with different operating system quirks. My code and 
setup has been tested and deployed only with Linux - it probably works on 
many other operating systems - but I don't have the time to find out!

> why software raid?

Hardware RAID would be okay too, I guess. I've just had a few Adaptec hardware 
RAID cards that have swallowed up arrays. In fact I have a 2100S and three 
SCSI drives sitting next to me - hasn't been online in over two years - 
because the controller will randomly mark one of the disks as being bad and 
then go into degraded mode. I've also stuck a cold spare into a RAID-1 array 
to have a hardware controller nicely rebuild a blank image on to the good 
drive. Linux software RAID, even when grossly misconfigured, has never given 
me any data loss.

As much as I hate to admit it, bang-for-the-buck software raid on high end IDE 
drives is pretty hard to beat. 

> what's the network bandwidth requirement?

1 gigabyte a day of outgoing bandwidth and the ability to move 20 gigabytes in 
one SCP command without having the transfer fail. 

-Jim

> -Jason
> ----------------------------------------
> Jason Winningham
> Computer Systems Engineer
> College of Engineering
> The University of Alabama in Huntsville
> http://support.eng.uah.edu/ http://www.eng.uah.edu/~jdw