On Thu, 8 Feb 2007 at 3:26pm, A R wrote
Server: OS: Debian Linux 2U - 6 SATA HD slots Pentium dual core processor (anyone have trouble with dual core?) 2GB RAM (too much? to little?) 2TB of HD spooling space, RAID0 w/four 500GB drives 120GB of operating system space on RAID1 with two 120GB drives LSI Logic LSI22320 Ultra320 SCSI Dual Channel PCIx card
I've no experience with Debian, so I can't comment on that. Dual core works just fine. For future proofing and power reasons, I'd recommend either Core2 Duo or Xeon 51xx (or Opteron) over anything Pentium at this point, but that doesn't have too much to do with amanda (which doesn't use much CPU in generaal). Make sure your motherboard has enough PCI busses and bandwidth for all the traffic amanda will generate. 2GB RAM is plenty.
How you set up your holding disk space depends on how you intend on running amanda. I run 2 simultaneous amdump's on my server (1 to each of the LTO3 drives in my Neo2K), and so I have 2 separate RAID0 arrays, each with 4 spindles. 4 spindles/array may be overkill, but disk is certainly not a bottleneck in my setup.
Loader: Overland ARCvault24 w/ two LTO-3 tape drives
I have both an AIT3 Powerloader and a LTO3 Neo2K working quite well with amanda. I see no reason why the ARCvault shouldn't work as well (although, admittedly, I haven't looked too hard at it)... After looking at the manual, I see that the robotics are on the same SCSI ID as the first drive, but a separate LUN. RH derived distros require an option in /etc/modprobe.conf to get that working. I'm not sure about Debian.
One note -- a quick look at the ARCvault24 docs doesn't show details on the cabling for a 2 drive setup. To run both LTO3 drives at the same time, they *need* to be on their own SCSI channels. If you can't do that with the 24 and you need that capability, you may need to look at the Neo2K.
Good luck. -- Joshua Baker-LePain Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University
