Toni Mueller wrote on Thu, Jan 04, 2007 at 10:50:01PM +0100: > On Thu, 04.01.2007 at 22:04:34 +0100, Marc Peters <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> @toni: as you might guess, the "hardware raid" of the nforce chipset >> doesn't work as hardware raid (except under w2k3 with the driver and >> maybe under solaris, which i don't have installed). > > These are my main concerns: Will the hardware raid do any good in the > x2200 series, and/or what's the current status with respect to the > serial console? SAS is ok if that makes a difference. When building a firewall, also consider that RAID might not be useful at all, that it might even be better avoided. If you really need to avoid downtime caused by hardware failures, you ought to have two carp(4)ed machines, anyway - the disks are not the only part prone to failure, after all. When one of the machines fails, switch it off, swap out the (single) hard disk, install a new one, reinstall the system and go back to carp. You are done, without any downtime whatsoever. Thus, RAID is not required for avoiding downtime. What else could it be required for? Minimizing reinstallation time? Installing a firewall should be done in less than half an hour, even much less if you have a good site40.tgz. And how often do you expect you will have to do that? In particular, how often compared to routine upgrades which have to be done a few times in each year, anyway? On the other hand, / on raid can be painful for various reasons. What else would you want to put on RAID in a firewall? Well, /var and /tmp should not be that valuable, so perhaps some user data? Hopefully, there is none, even if you plan some kind of "combo style" - you should probably not combine your firewall with any server processes handling valuable user data. RAID can be very useful when building e.g. file servers and various other devices - firewalls are the typical place where you might be better off focussing you attention to other parts of the system, avoiding unnecessary complexity of the hard disk setup. For more detailed discussions of this recurring topic, see the archives, in particular various posts by Nick Holland.
