I just had fun installing a journalling file system and speeding up my server at the same time.

I had a problem where my RAID was taking 10 hours to rebuild. Someone told me reiserfs would solve my problem.

That wasn't the problem though. The hard drive parameters were setup as low as they go. I have 6 - 40GB 7200RPM HD and they were all running without 32-bit addressing and UDMA. It was taking 11 hours to rebuild the array because each drive was running at 2.9 MB/sec.

Through the process of learning how to install Reiserfs I learned how to check and set the HD Params. Very Cool. So Now I have a RAID that will rebuild itself in 30 minutes (Drives getting 27MB/sec now :) in the case of a HD Failure AND a journaling file system to speed access and make my data corruption resistant.

It's amazing how much more difficult it is to do clustering when it's open source. I think it will really mature in a year or so though. Webmin is really becoming the MMC of the Linux world.

I will never suffer a linux box without fast HD's again :)

My next thing is to setup rsync to start doing mirroring in a cluster of web servers on linux.

References I used;
The main page for Reiserfs - how to get and install it
http://www.namesys.com/

Where I found all the OS updates I needed to compile the new kernel with reiserfs.
http://www.rpmfind.net

The bottom of this page to help me get my system back when I screwed up the kernel build with Reiserfs support.
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-5.1-Manual/manual/doc117.html

Here to figure out why it was taking almost half an hour to rebuild the kernel on my PIII 450 and how long it would tak on an Athlon XP 2100 :)
http://www.tomshardware.com

And of course http://www.webmin.com/ which make things a whole lot easier.

More great writing on Journaling file systems
http://www.linux-mag.com/2000-08/journaling_05.html

Leon

Question;
Have you tested HP NetRAID 1M for clustering? HP is saying that model 2M, 4M are the only supported. Because If I'm going to use 1M, my setup would be 2 each for the server where one card is connected to my internal drives and the other one is connected to the external storage. Two Netraid 1m is cheaper than Netraid 2M. Cost effective, I believe. :)

Answer;
See my last answer on RAID Adapters. To answer this directly, No I haven't tested this card.

However, Cost Effective does not mean "Easy to Implement" or "Easy to Troubleshoot". Going with an Internal RAID card is pushing it but as long as the vendor supports the config, you can get help.

Going with an Internal RAID card that the vendor doesn't support in the configuration you are wanting to use is asking for trouble. You are on your own when it breaks and that is not a good place to be when you have 50 (or 500) users breathing down your neck :)

Leon

Question
Can I create a cluster solution even if the SCSI cards are not RAID capable?

Answer
Clustering does not rely on there being an external RAID - Just an external drive and a cluster compatible SCSI Card. Most clustering software just looks for a Shared SCSI Device.

If you want a RAID to work with, you need to have an external RAID that looks like a SCSI drive to the OS. Some Vendors have internal RAID cards that trick MS Cluster into thinking they are a regular SCSI Card talking to an external RAID. HP and Compaq do this with their "MS Cluster Compatible" Internal RAID Cards.

Preferably you would have a self contained External RAID with it's own Host Adapter and just have normal SCSI Cards in the servers. However, This is almost always more expensive. The "Almost" is because you can make your own using products from CMD and others that are very reasonable in price and give good performance as well.

Leon

Marcel Asks:
Are you sure that i can use the Adaptec 2940 controller with a ms windows 2000 cluster?
It is not on the HCL of MS. ( http://www.microsoft.com/hcl )
---------

You "Probably" can use it. The only way to know for sure is to test it out. You should be able to find working 2940's on ebay for as little as $20.00 so the price is right.

I know that it works with windows 2000. Whether it is supported by MS Cluster is not guaranteed but I am willing to bet it will.

Leon

Salim writes.
"I want to set-up a clustering environment so as to build cluster-aware application.I am using windows 2000 advance server.So can you please tell me how much will it cost(min.) to set up this kind of infrastructure which implements clustering on two servers.And please tell me the minimum sysfiguration required for this."

This all depends on what you want to accomplish and how large the application you want to cluster is. If you are clustering the Apache webserver which is very resource efficient, you can get away with a couple of 200 - 300 MHz computers for testing purposes and slightly faster machines for production (depending again on how large the site is and how resource hungry it is).

Windows 2000 Advance server will run resonably well - by itself - on a computer with IDE drives and 256 MB RAM. However, if your going to spend the thousands it costs to buy Win2K Advanced Server, normally you would put it on a system which is worth at least as much as the software.

For a decent production system with cluster certified RAID controllers and external storage from a major vendor, you can count on about $3000.00 - $5000.00 per server and the same or more (depending on storage requirements) for the RAID enclosure.

For testing, you can use the test system I suggest here which you should be able to build from some spare desktops and an external SCSI case. If you bought it new you would pay about $3000.00 US for the bits and pieces.

You could also go whole hog and buy big name hardware from HP/Compaq or IBM or DELL with an EMC RAID Array and pay in excess of $100,000.00.

Again it all depends on what you need to accomplish and how large the application you are trying to cluster is. Sorry not to give a definate figure but it's a pretty grey area and every vendor you talk to about this will give you a wildly different quote.

The more you learn about clustering, the better you will be able to judge.

Leon

Welcome to a Q&A page which will be updated more often than the clustering area - I am not very current in the main pages I am afraid.

I am going to answer question I recieve here so, hopefully, I can help more people with their clustering questions.

Leon