Topic: UPS & Tape Backup

[Steve]

What is the best solution for UPS with e-smith?  I saw some How-To's for setting up panels for use with certain brands of UPS.  Can the e-smith server be configured to auto-shutdown on power loss?  What is the best UPS (preferably cheap) to use with e-smith?  It only needs power long enough to auto-shutdown (if possible).

Also, I am interested in a tape drive.  I am very unfamiliar with tape drives.  Are they problematic when installing/configuring?  What is the best tape drive (once again, preferable cheap) to use?  Is tape backup still recommended when using software raid or vice versa?

All information will be greatly appreciated!!

Thanks,
Steve

[Dan Brown]

Whether tape backup and/or software (or hardware) RAID are recommended depend largely on the application of your server, but RAID isn't a replacement for a backup.  RAID will not solve the problem of "Oh ****, I didn't want to delete that file!", while a backup can.  OTOH, recovering from a drive failure with RAID can be a lot quicker than without it (much more so if you have hardware RAID and hot-swap drives).  If you're using the server in any kind of critical application, I'd suggest that both would be the safest bet.

Most SCSI tape drives are pretty much plug and play, AFAIK.  IDE may not be as well-supported, but support still seems to be pretty good.  Which one is "best" depends on a lot of factors, and the best drive is generally not the cheapest one.  Some common tape technologies are Travan, DAT/DDS, and DLT.  I've had too much trouble with Travan to recommend it to my worst enemy; I might as well have sent the backups to /dev/null (would have saved me a lot of time).  DAT is pretty popular and media is cheap, but I've heard some negative things about its reliability as well.  From what I've heard, DLT is pretty reliable (FWIW, it's what I'm looking at for my server when I come up with the money for a tape backup).

Major factors to consider for a tape drive would include capacity, speed, reliability, and price.

[Steve]

Thanks Dan.

I'm in the same 'when I come up with the money for a tape backup' situation!  I am hoping to get to that point in the near future though and would like to go ahead and start looking.  I will check into DLT.

Also, the reason I'm looking for a UPS solution is because I've had a few problems requiring a manual 'fsck /' after the power has been interrupted.  Do you know if an IDE software raid provided by e-smith will continue to function when a drive goes bad?  Have you tried a test recovery of software raid?  (I just remembered, I guess I could kill one of the drives and test it myself!)

Thanks for the information!  It will be a great help!

[Kelvin]

Hi Steve,

Maybe look at VXA (formerly Ecrix) tape drives. They are cheaper than DLTs and supposed to be quite good (personally haven't tried one though).

Kelvin

[ClaudioG]

Hi, ...disclaimer: my english is very broken.... (Is there how-to for this? )

Tape: I use Hp DAT Dss3 on SME and works fine, but not cheap solution.
(I have installed many DAT on other OS, and I have had no big problems)

Soft Raid: works well. I have simulated various failure situation in a test server, all test passed (ie: switch drive, boot for one, boot from the other, format the first,...)
It is only request the correct boot sequence in BIOS with boot for the secondary channel master

Backup: In the same test server, I'm testing various backup plan and tool. When the tests are completed, I will write something....


Regards,
ClaudioG