Experiences with e-smith.
Hi all,
I’ve received so much help from the forum (directly as well as searching through archives). I often don’t feel I have the technical expertise to give much back.
But one thing I think I can do is write in some detail about my recent experiences with
e-smith in a form that gives some start to finish context on using e-smith.
I run a company that supplies computer solutions (networking, hardware, problem solving etc for small business in Melbourne Australia).
I’ve been running e-smith since 5.12 (about a year).
Client 1 (medical stomach stapling business)
This started out when I was a part time programmer.
We started out with doing the doctors home with shared interenet.
This was before that days of cheap hardware routers. We used a Pentium 1 boxes for the home and business and connected them both to the Optus broadband cable (Australian cable broadband supplier). Both were running optus 5.12.
We were able to share internet fine.
At the office a third machine was running an Microsoft access 97 based medical software program (sitting on a Microsoft 98 box shared to the local network).
We had told the client that he’d be able to get to his files over a VPN. The doctor was able to, but it ran so slowly it wasn’t worth it. We briefly considered setting up a free/swan type connection until we realised that since both the IP address were dynamic, it would not work (or certainly wouldn’t work easily).
9 months later the customer moves office and expands business.
I sell him 8 windows xp boxes for office machines and move the Pentium 1 to the new office.
We then set up a new server in the office which has the following:
Gigabyte motherboard with Pentium 4 CPU
2 hardrives running software raid
1 seagate 20/40 gigabyte backup drive.
We also moved the access 97 application to the new network drive on the server so it could be probably backed up.
The tape drive seemed to work and I thought. Great, I have new client coming on line in 3 weeks, I’ll test the tape drive by loading the backup tape onto the new client’s hardware.
This is when I discovered I was having trouble with the Seagate tape backup units.
Client 2 (medical eye surgeons).
Older and wiser I start on my next client.
They originally get a great motherboard for there server. A gigabyte GA-8KNXP that has everything, SATA, RAID. Unfortunetly it was so complex that I didn’t want to use it the onboard raid may confuse things. Also the original I bought it was the advertised feature of ‘dual power’. I thought this meant that I could plug two power supplies into the motherboard and if one failed it would keep going. This was not the case as I found out when I ordered and extra power supply from my hardware supplier and told them to install it. It was just advertising.
The main reason for getting that advanced board gone I sold it onto a musician friend as loss (he could use all the weird digitial in and out interfaces), and bought a simple gigabyte athlon board.
I then tested the Seagate tranvan drive that I got with this new server by trying to back and restore from my previous client. No luck. Nothing would make the Seagate back up drives work. An extensive look on the forums showed others had similar problems.
Never afraid to throw money at a technical problem I bought a sony AIX tape drive (30 gigabyte uncompress) for $1200 AUD and tried it.
3 backups successful out of 3 and it worked out of the box.
By this stage I’d was also worried about the software raid on my original client.
My main problem was that I had no way of knowing if a harddrive had failed and no experience with rebuilding software raid. (and little desire to learn).
Having learnt this I won’t a hardware solution. I looked firstly at the adeptac card, and rapidly dismissed it as the forum showed me it had no support.
I was then leaning towards the 3ware card as support for linux was built in.
However you still have to know how to check for failures and how to rebuild.
I settled on the accuysus system of IDE to IDE raid. The raid system is hidden from the operating system which only sees it as a single IDE drive.
This gets around the problem of knowing if a harddrive has failed and also how to rebuild it. If a harddrive fails it lets out a very loud beep to warn everyone.
Now the only thing to do is convince my first client that they need a different tape drive and a hardware raid server.
All up I’ve found my experiences with e-smith to be very positive and a great solution for small businesses. Some care with choosing hardware goes a fair way to making life easier however.
Damien
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