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Date:      Fri, 23 Jan 2004 09:13:37 +0000
From:      Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk>
To:        Heinrich Rebehn <rebehn@ant.uni-bremen.de>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: How dangerous is 5.2 for production use
Message-ID:  <20040123091337.GA46755@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophile.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <4010DF2B.1070804@ant.uni-bremen.de>
References:  <4010DF2B.1070804@ant.uni-bremen.de>

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On Fri, Jan 23, 2004 at 09:45:31AM +0100, Heinrich Rebehn wrote:

> I am considering switching our "production" server from 4.9 to 5.2.=20
> "production" means that it serves some 20 people at our university=20
> institute.
> Unfortunately the machine crashes occasionally which would be tolerable=
=20
> if it was up again immediately. However the fsck of our 300+500 GB RAIDs=
=20
> takes almost an hour and that's why i want to switch to 5.x because it=20
> fscks in the background.
> The machine is an ASUS A7V333 with AMD XP 1800+ and 512 MB RAM, 3ware=20
> 7500 RAID.
> It provides the 'usual' services:
> - NFS
> - Samba
> - IMAP
> - SMTP
> - LPD printing
> - Mailman
> - HTTP
> - Postgres
> - LDAP User, mail aliases, automount info
> - IMP Webmail
>=20
> So, no fancy hard- or software, i guess.
> Would it be very hazardous to sitch to 5.2 already now?

I think that you would probably not have any worse trouble with 5.2 as
you do with 4.9.  However, I'm wondering why your server "crashes
occasionally".  The spec. you show should be quite capable of handling
e-mail, including webmail, for 20 people.  Unless they are sending
round enormous multimedia files or something.  Serving out 800Gb of
files via NFS and Samba, or running Postgresql databases of that sort
of size is going to stress the system though.  If you are crashing
because your system is running out of resources under load, then
upgrading to 5.2 probably won't help you very much.  Better to slap in
another half Gig of RAM, if you can afford it, and take a good hard
look at tuning(7).

> Another thing: Is there any point in converting the filesystems to UFS2=
=20
> (in a later step)?

Certainly.  You will find it better suited to the large filesystems
you have than UFS1.  I also have a vague feeling that background fsck
is a UFS2 feature, but I can't find documentation to either confirm or
deny that.

--=20
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                       26 The Paddocks
                                                      Savill Way
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey         Marlow
Tel: +44 1628 476614                                  Bucks., SL7 1TH UK

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