[arch-dev-public] space problems on gerolde

[Aaron Griffin]

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 12:54 PM, Paul Mattal <paul at mattal.com> wrote:
> Dan McGee wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 8:24 AM, Dusty Phillips <buchuki at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> 2008/10/20 Dale Blount <dale at archlinux.org>:
>>>>>
>>>>> I think we should look into upgrading our disks. Dale, could you look
>>>>> into pricing and complexity of doing this? I know you mentioned that
>>>>> gerolde has no extra slots, so we're have to do an actual upgrade...
>>>>> Details would be appretiated
>>>>>
>>>> 300GB 80pin Ultra 320 drives are about $400 each.  Downtime would be
>>>> several hours to complete the upgrade work (disk copy, expand
>>>> partitions, expand filesystem, and probably an -Syu), and we'd want to
>>>> make sure we had a complete backup before beginning.
>>>
>>> If y'all are willing to weight until I sell out of USB keys, I can buy
>>> the drive out of schwag income.
>>>
>>> Any chance of selling the old drive or is it just scrap?
>>>
>>> Is it only disk space we're concerned with? I understood CPU usage was
>>> pretty high here too; maybe we should consider a fundraising drive for
>>> a second server. Maybe a public server and a dev server?
>>
>> Eliott and I discussed this when he was a dev. We thought the best
>> idea would be to have a second server that was almost exclusively a
>> database machine, so no need for direct public access and could be
>> served off the second ethernet interface that is currently sitting
>> unused on gerolde. Offloading the DB to another machine would free up
>> a lot of RAM and allow a lot more caching to be done (reducing IO
>> waits), as well as giving the DB completely dedicated resources on
>> another machine.
>>
>> Dale would obviously have to weigh in on this, and it really doesn't
>> solve the disk space issues, but it would drastically reduce some of
>> the load on our current machine.
>
> I really like the idea of a separate database server (obviously connected on
> a very fast link to Gerolde). I acknowledge that doesn't solve the disk
> space problem, so I think the drive upgrade should also be done.
>
> Can we do any processor upgrades in Gerolde that would be financially
> sensible? Adding or upgrading existing ones?

Good question. We have a decent chunk of money in donations right now.
Dale, is there anything else we could throw money at to upgrade the
machine?