[Sysadmin] Spec'ing Server

[Judah McAuley]

David A. Ulevitch wrote:
> 
> On Jun 3, 2004, at 7:57 AM, David Kaufman wrote:
> 
>> also, as i posted on the theforum just now, *two* boxes might not be 
>> out of
>> the question, if monthly rates in "the matrix" continue to tumble :-)
>>
>>
> 
> Regardless of backups and RAID...two boxes are always better than one 
> when talking about these low-end PC's.
> 
> If a server fails it would be nice to be able to (doesn't need to be 
> automatic) fail-over to another box that's up and online with a recent 
> snapshot of all the data.

Load balancing for l.e.o. certainly makes sense. Apart from the 
occasional /.'ing, I think the w.e.o. load is reasonably consistent. 
Doing the database replication for any db-oriented CMS is also more of a 
challenge. I certainly think that fail-over is a good idea, but if we 
are going to do fail-over, we might as well do load balancing too.

We could go with 2 of the Super Celeron 2.4 configed boxes. I think the 
little extra processor speed and the increase to a gig of ram is 
probably worthwhile. at $59 a month, that would be $1400 a year for two 
boxen.

Should we put a load balancing bit into the spec for any w.e.o. 
replacement? I certainly think its worth it for l.e.o., but is the 
overall cost justified?

Judah