Re: Minutes of the GNOME Foundation Board meeting 28 November 2000

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Alan Cox <alan lxorguk ukuu org uk> writes:

> >   nay, it's based on software RAID :-\, you know that journalling and
> > softraid are not friend at all ... yet.
> 
> OK 2 or 4 port IDE raid card as well, maybe a disk to go raid1 not raid5 is
> needed for that

Since this seems to be a subject of interest, lets see if I can summarize.

 - The CVS machine is due for a rebuild as soon as we get everything 
   migrated temporarily to the new machine, so any reconfiguration
   is possible. 

 - Moving the CVS temporary files to a different partition and simply   
   recreating it on reboot would probably fix the fact that fsck
   never completes cleanly, but would still be somewhat suboptimal
   compared to a journalling FS.

 - I probably would still be nervous about ext3 on general principle,
   but if Alan says it is OK, I trust him.

 - Journalling is not compatible with Linux 2.2 and software RAID,
   so if we want to go journalling, we need to go hardware RAID.

 - The existing drives (and spares) we have are SCSI (9g RAID
   barracudas), so a SCSI solution would generally be preferred.

   Since the machine is going to be CVS only, we don't need an upgrade
   in total capacity - a 4-drive array should be plenty big
   enough with raid-5 or even raid-1. (The CVSROOT is currently ~2gig.)

 - If somebody has a recommendation for a SCSI raid controller that
   is reliable and trouble-free to configure with Linux, and not
   horribly expensive, finding the means to purchase it shouldn't 
   be a problem.

Regards,
                                        Owen