[vox-tech] NAS/Printer Server/Web Server?

[Alex Mandel]

On 06/24/2010 04:49 PM, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Alex Mandel (tech_dev at wildintellect.com):
> 
> [Interesting details about hardware options you're considering:]
> 
>> Note to self: For some reason I'd never really thought about the fact
>> that you should put such a device on a UPS. In hindsight, this is
>> probably what killed my previous NAS drive. 
> 
> Are you thinking it was a power surge / spike or low-voltage line
> condition that fried the drive?
> 
> Out here on the Left Coast, serious line-power problems are pretty rare,
> especially compared to what, say, LILCO customers have to put up with
> in the NYC area.  But the matter is worth pondering.
> 
> I have for a couple of decades run full-service *ix servers at my
> residences on (variously) T-1 and broadband, so I weigh some of the same
> concerns you do.  In April 2009, the machine then running
> linuxmafia.com, a 1998-era VA Research model 500 2U server I literally
> rescued from a dumpster one day around year 2000 while working at VA
> Linux Systems, got fried during a late-spring lightning storm, and I
> hastily replaced it with a slightly less ancient VA Linux model 2230.
> That's the only time I've ever lost hardware from AC power fluctuations
> (in the Bay Area, anyway).
> 
> Back in summer 2001, when California went through rolling blackouts, I
> pondered getting a UPS but decided it would be solving the wrong
> problem:  My suffering small amounts of downtime when PG&E lost power
> was OK as long as the machine came back up.  So, the missing ingredient
> was reliable journaling filesystems, and I figured out how to migrate my
> system from ext2 to XFS.  (See 'XFS Conversion' on
> http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Filesystems .  To explain, ext3 was not then
> production-ready.)
> 
> Still, it's bothered me to have my hardware, particularly HDs, exposed
> to PG&E-caused damage _if_ that actually happens.  So, I went shopping
> -- and _still_ found UPSes to be a solution to the wrong problem.
> Instead, I bought an APC-branded power filtering / conditioning unit,
> thereby addressing the power-quality issue without saddling me with a
> failure-prone lead-acid battery.
> 
> 
> Also, having recently bought an external (USB/Firewire) 2 TB drive and
> been astonished by the low cost, I'm considering buying a second one of
> those (to make a RAID1 pair) and, say, a ShivaPlug to replace the model
> 2230:  That would cut the electricity hit to almost nothing -- and still 
> let me use standard Debian on real mass storage.
> 
> Anyway, think twice before putting printers on your UPSes (if that's
> part of what you're considering), as many printers draw gobs of power
> when in service, and are not typically an essential service you need
> running during power outages.  

Handymen at the breaker box was the outage cause (several times over, in
hindsite I should have shut them down all down). I'm well aware that
printers don't go on the battery backup part of the ups, nothing wrong
with the surge only side though. From what I've seen most APC units have
some sort of power conditioning to ensure consistency.

The most important aspect is the safety of the data, while externals are
cheap, I can't afford to have one fail before the data gets moved to a
new one.

I think the previous one was  NTFS and there was little if any way of
trying to work with the drive in the case. Now that it's out of the case
I'm going to try hooking it up to my desktop and probably get the stuff
back(though there is nothing unique on the drive at the moment that
doesn't exist elsewhwere).

Manual rebooting between my room and the living room, not an issue for
me. I prefer that things stay off if there's been an outage (20 min+)
until I get back to check on them, very different use case than an
office or server room.

How do you RAID 2 external USB enclosures as a network drive, or are you
talking software raid with both plugged in to a computer?

Thanks,
Alex