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Re: NFS recommendation



On Fri, 4 Jun 1999, Udi Finkelstein wrote:


  Hi,


    Here is what I have to offer.


    From my experience, it would be a "BAD" idea to tie up between the
system partitions and this partition you want to make available to Solaris
clients.

    So, for starters, get a fast (7200 rpm) ATA disk for the system,
inside the computer.

    Then, use whatever RAID you want for the 3x22GB ATA/66 disks, from
stripes (RAID0), to RAID5 (where you'll lose 20%, the cost of reliability).

    Install RedHat 6.0, not 5.2. Pay attention that the 2.2.x kernels have
a much more aggressive approach towards NFS. This broke some clients that
didn't implement NFS correctly, like NetApp OS (OnTAP). Network Appliance
have fixed it (5.2.1P2 is fixed).

    If you chose 2.2.x kernels, do not use knfsd yet. It is still in
development, and it's not a wise choice till it's stable, since I guess
you want to provide a stable environment. Get the latest nfsd server
(version 2.2beta40 or newer).

    I am not sure about how Solaris clients work, but run rpc.mountd and
rpc.nfsd with the -n flag (read the man page). 

    Also, the good stuff about the 2.2beta40 (I use beta43) rpc.nfsd is
that it can finally run a few servers simulatenously, without disabling
(rw) like before. This should improve performance.

    You haven't pointed out the rate at which your clients are supposed to
read/write, the number of clients, and how much concurrent traffic you
expect to see simultaneously.
  
    If the answer to this is that there are 20 clients or more, each
writing and reading all the time (and not the same files over and over,
which are cached), and at 100Mbit per workstation, you might think of
getting a Gigabit switch, where the NFS server will work at 1Gigabit rate
to the switch, and the clients at 100Mbit/s. But this only if performance
is critical. You should then use the ATA/66 card, to improve disk IO
performance.

    To conclude, SGI is gonna release XFS, and ext3fs file system is also
around the corner. These file systems support striping in a more native
and stable manner, and both ofer Journaling.


--Ariel


> Hi,
> 
> I'm about to install a new Linux server at work in a few days, which will be
> used as an NFS server (SAMBA would also be nice, but not high priority).
> 
> I have a few questions:
> 
> 1. What is the latest reliable configuration I should be using? I'm familiar
> with RedHat, so it boils down to RH5.2, RH6.0, or RH6.0 with the latest 2.2.x
> kernel. I would use 5.2 if it's more mature unless it's NFS performance is
> **substantially** lower than 6.0's performance. Also notice we *don't* use an
> SMP machine, so all the 2.2.x improvements in SMP are not relevant.
> 
> 2. Is it possible to configure all 3 disks as one single ext2 partition, on a
> standard kernel? I know there are patches for that, but I'd rather install
> something simple that works out of thebox.
> 
> If you are not bored with this, please read on a little bit more:
> 
> The system is based on an intel server motherboard (I think it's a T440BX, if
> my memory serves me right), which has onboard video, 100MBit ethernet, and
> SCSI (IIRC). We orderda Colombus III case (which the intel web page claims to
> hold up to 5 hard disks, and support ventilation for fast and hot 10,000 RPM
> disks).
> 
> The system will initially hold 3 x 22GB IBM ATA/66 disks. We didn't choose
> SCSI disks because they are twice as expensive, which we don't really need. We
> may add a promise ATA/66 card later and more ATA/66 disks if we need to. (Yes,
> I know the onboard 440BX chipset does only ATA/33).
> 
> The purpose of this server is to serve as a large **temporary file** storage
> location. This usually involves object files, executables, and simulation data
> files. All data is non essential, and can be easily recreated, even if I
> completely reformat the system. The only reason we added it was the
> prohibitively high price of adding fiber channel disks to our main NetApp F720
> NFS server. We don't want it to be full with gigabytes of temp files.
> 
> Our clients are all UltraSparc machines, running Solaris 2.5.1 or 2.6 .
> 
> Please notice that I'm *NOT* a sysadmin. My main job is hardware design, and
> I'm not supposed to spend too much time on this (my bosses wants me to spend
> my time on hardware design, not on system administration). I need
> recommendations for a configuration that installs simply, and that works
> *reasonably* well as far as speed and reliability. even though it's a temp
> file server, file corruptions on heavy load during work are not really
> welcomed...
> 
> (My experience with RedHat 5.2 was wonderfull. Within 30 minutes of opening up
> the brand new Compaq box we got, I booted a Cheapbytes RH5.2 CD, zapped the
> Win95 system, and had it running a private FTP server. Out of these 30
> minutes, only 10 minutes was spent at the keyboard answering questions...)
> 
> thanks,
> Udi
> 
> 

   +---------------------------------------------------------------+
   | Ariel Biener                                                  |
   | e-mail: ariel@post.tau.ac.il           Work phone: 03-6406086 |
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