The Major BBS Forums (Archive)

Well, I finally got both the DMA server and the MAIN servers on-line.. I'm not sure of the hard drive performance on the main server, even though it's a 10k rpm u320 drive, but it will hopefully work until I can afford some raid mirroring for it.

I was trying to think what I could do with the old server, because it wouldn't be good for a PHP server. I think my choices are to try it out as a new door game server, or since it has 6 5 1/4" slots, maybe use it as a file/cd/dvd-rom server.

When I mention cd servers to people, they kind of question it, because of the price of hard drive space. I believe, however, that I can save a lot of backup space/media when it's time to backup the board to dvd. There was a time when the whole board could be backed up onto one cd, but now, it takes like 1 dvd plus 1 cd, and if you add the dma server and door game server, that's another 2 dvds at least.

With my current backup system in the dma server, I can get appx one week's worth of backups before having to take the server down,and copy the contents of the hard drive to another hard drive or dvd. That could probably be postponed by another week by making a separate partition and then manually copying over the contents of partition 1 to partition 2 (or just changing the batch file to point to the other partition during backup after a week) - Like a lot of people say: Raid is fine and dandy, but raid mirroring doesn't prevent data corruption, as data corruption is just mirrored like any other thing lol. It's more like a drive failsafe. I believe the door game server, however, in the long run, would benefit more from mirroring than any of the other servers.

Anyway, maybe I can rest for a few days before something else comes up... yeah, right!

Malakai wrote:Well, I finally got both the DMA server and the MAIN servers on-line.. I'm not sure of the hard drive performance on the main server, even though it's a 10k rpm u320 drive, but it will hopefully work until I can afford some raid mirroring for it.

Good to hear you got it all going, I will be upgradeing from U-160 to U-320 this weekend. Let you know how the performace improvement goes.

I'm beginning to think that the performance is going to come from the hard drive controllers just as much as it comes from the drives themselves. There are fast hard drives and slow hard drives, but when you compare the speed of the same hard drive on one system to the next on different controllers, some systems are faster than others, and of course, integrated controllers seem a bit slow than the others, and controllers with cache on them are a lot faster.

Even the IBM Xseries eservers seem to have pretty slow integrated controllers.

MajorMud has now been put on its own dedicated NT server, and I'm currently working on another small dedicated server, as well as the os/2 multinode ghost server, and hopefully soon working on bringing back up lost gonzo bbs.

I would have just used the mmud/nt server, but Brad didn't have an ICO DMA client registered. I guess he didn't need to, when he had major tcp/ip on his DOS system. If I can get him to send me his last working copy of the DOS board, I should be able to re-configure it put it up within 24 hours of receiving it, but if we have to start from scratch, that's going to be a nightmare lol.

Hey man, don't now if you thought of this already, but instead of spanning a multi-dvd set requiring a user attended backup, you could pick up a bluray burner for 200 bux and back it up to a 25gig disc.

this may sound dumb but are you useing smartdrv or some kind of caching controler. That speeds things right up.

Joe

Malakai wrote:I'm beginning to think that the performance is going to come from the hard drive controllers just as much as it comes from the drives themselves. There are fast hard drives and slow hard drives, but when you compare the speed of the same hard drive on one system to the next on different controllers, some systems are faster than others, and of course, integrated controllers seem a bit slow than the others, and controllers with cache on them are a lot faster.

Even the IBM Xseries eservers seem to have pretty slow integrated controllers.