Computers
Storage server 2012 part 1 – Where to put it all?
by Stede on Jan.29, 2012, under Computers, Networks, Storage
Say you have a business that generates hundred’s of Gigabytes of data per month. This business has a storage server with a hardware SATA RAID controller that has gone through a couple updates and can hold ~9TB now. It is also almost full.
Maybe you have a home media and backup server that holds 12TB using Linux mdraid and SATA port multipliers. And… it’s also full.
This is a problem. A real, actual, I-am-having-it-right-now sort of problem. So I decided – it’s time to build something more substantial, more scaleable. For work and home. That is the Storage Server 2012 project.
What do we need?
The secret is SAS – Serial attached SCSI. There is a magic little device called a port expander that works like a SATA port multiplier but instead of 5 ports you get dozens and dozens. And instead of a tangle of cables the size of your arm you can run one (quad-link) cable internally or externally to connect it all. The best part? You can still use cheap SATA drives.
First look at SNMP management
by Stede on May.02, 2010, under Computers, Networks
While using an excellent network monitoring utility from MikroTik called The Dude I discovered I’d been missing something very basic from my arsenal of geeky software tools, SNMP. Simple Network Management Protocol has been around for a long time and can provide some useful insight into what’s happening with the servers, workstations, printers, switches and routers on your network. Want to keep an eye on the CPU load of a VMWare host? See how much bandwidth is being used on the 10 Gigabit link to your fileserver? SNMP can do it.
Here I am going to look at read-only SNMP monitoring with the barebones setup needed to see what use the information may be to you. I’m not going to try and explain how SNMP works or even consider that exposing all the MIB’s could hog resources on the machines that are being monitored. Sorting all that can come later.
