[volunteergrid2-l] New Member

[Steve Dodson]

Welcome, and thanks for the introduction!  I've made a few comments in 
[brackets] below:

On 10/07/2011 01:36 PM, Christoph Langguth wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> first off, thanks for having set up this project and for accepting me
> into it! :-)
>
> So here's a bit about myself: I'm administering the server of a
> student's club in Jena, Germany (rosenkeller.org). We are essentially
> self-hosted -- we have our own physical Linux machine acting as WWW and
> mail server, and as a gateway for the internal machines. Thankfully,
> we're connected directly to the University network with Gigabit
> Ethernet, and all of that with no cost for us (University maintains the
> infrastructure) :-)
>
> So that little server is essentially where almost all of the pretty
> important data is -- like our web presence, and "professional" and
> personal mails and files of our staff and members.
>
> The main reason for applying here is backup provisioning. While we do
> make local backups through backuppc, we don't really have a working
> solution which would survive a catastrophic event (like the office
> burning down). Offsite backup is always a good idea, but we simply can't
> really afford commercial solutions. Well, we probably could if I
> insisted really hard that backups actually are important and worth the
> "insurance" fee, but hey:
>
> - a "social" distributed storage where we get the benefits for free and
> can offer the same for other people is just more inline with my personal
> point of view
> - it's easier if "management" is not involved in these things, so it's
> more hassle-free for me as well if I can provide a working solution
> without much "organizational" overhead (managing bills etc.)
> - finally, it's simply fun to get into new technologies :-)
>
> When I said we don't have a working solution, I actually cheated a bit:
> we do have a solution based on wuala ( http://wuala.com ). This worked
> pretty well until a few days ago, when they announced that their storage
> trading would not be supported anymore. If you're interested, here's the
> (mostly disappointed) feedback from affected users:
> https://forum.wuala.com/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=2231 . I am one of the many
> users who think that that decision was made more because of strategic
> than technical reasons (LaCie bought wuala some time ago...), but that
> is speculation and convincing responses from the developers are scarce.
>
> It is actually in that forum that I learned about Tahoe LAFS. I was
> intrigued, so I just installed it and tried it out with my own little
> "infrastructure". It looked promising, but obviously, a local
> infrastructure is not terribly useful if the goal is off-site storage.
> So this is how I ended up finding VG2 and thinking it's just the right
> thing to do, so here I am :-)
>
> Now that you know where I'm trying to go, here's a little summary of how
> I intend to contribute:
>
> - Server machine is up 24/7 (well, at least it should, unless Murphy's
> law strikes)
> - Connectivity is Gigabit Ethernet, so both up- and downloads should
> normally work decently fast :-)

[From my understanding, your uploads will proceed at the speed of the 
slowest node's upload speeds...unfortunately, for many of us in the 
states, residential (i.e. DSL) upload speeds are horrendous.  This, 
combined with the fact that ea. upload is actually sent multiple times 
will combine to make for a *very* slow (weeks) initial upload. That 
said, I wish I had access to similar network connectivity!!]

>
> There are a few open questions left, most of which I'll probably bug you
> with in subsequent mails (like what is the best strategy for backing up
> etc). One thing probably needs to be sorted out first though, so here it
> goes straight away: The volume that we need to back up is not terribly
> high, at the moment it's around 60 GB for a full backup, and I expect it
> to grow only slowly.
>
> At the moment, we only have one internal disk (500 GB), of which some
> 250GB are free. Of course, even for local backups a second disk is
> required, and the same would go for the storage provided to tahoe.
> Therefore, we intend to buy an additional disk for that purpose. If I'm
> not mistaken, you have a requirement of 1TB or more -- is that still
> up-to-date? From my point of view, the most sensible thing would be to
> buy a 1.5TB or 2TB disk, and use it as the target both for local
> backups, and for tahoe. Subtracting local backups, this should leave (at
> least) around 1 or 1.5 TB for tahoe.

[Unless the requirement was changed, I believe 500GB is the min and 1TB 
the max. There is a good piece on the Wiki regarding this range and why 
it was chosen.  You might consider carving out a 1TB partition from your 
new disk or simply plugging in an USB external HDD. Many of the original 
nodes (in the states) of which I'm aware use LVM and/or a RAID variant. 
  I picked up a 2TB disk for less than $80 USD about 9 months ago ... am 
guessing you can find similar HDDs for even less now?]

>
> It will probably still take a few weeks until everything will be set up
> here, and there most probably will be a few round trips with questions I
> have, but for starters -- do you think the above makes sense? Do you
> have any particular hints or comments?
>
> Cheers,
> Chris
>
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 

soli Deo gloria