CentOS - Mar 2008 - smartest way to setup new system (DELL PE 4600)

Hi all,

One of our servers (very old) died last week and I'm setting up a new 
CentOS 5.1 box to replace it.  Primarily used as a samba fileshare on a 
mostly windows-workstation network.

This system will, ideally, have the OS on a 146 GB SCSI drive, with user 
data on a 300GB SCSI, both attached to the backplane of the 4600.

My question is this:

What's best practice and most desirable partitioning for doing this, and 
how would I go about setting up mirrors of both the OS and the user data 
drives?

Thanks in advance for any help on what I know is a rather newbie 
question....please chalk it up to lack of sleep and veritable hounding 
by the 'higher ups' :)

Kind regards,
-Ray

On Monday 24 March 2008 15:32:14 Ray Leventhal wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> One of our servers (very old) died last week and I'm setting up a new
> CentOS 5.1 box to replace it.  Primarily used as a samba fileshare on a
> mostly windows-workstation network.
>
> This system will, ideally, have the OS on a 146 GB SCSI drive, with user
> data on a 300GB SCSI, both attached to the backplane of the 4600.
>
> My question is this:
>
> What's best practice and most desirable partitioning for doing this,
and
> how would I go about setting up mirrors of both the OS and the user data
> drives?
>
> Thanks in advance for any help on what I know is a rather newbie
> question....please chalk it up to lack of sleep and veritable hounding
> by the 'higher ups' :)
>
Don't know about best practice, but here are my thoughts.  Is the system
drive
likely to change much?  I'd be inclined to do a partimage and only re-do
that
when significant changes have happened.  Yes, on restoring it you would need 
to run updates, but that's a fairly quick way of getting back into the game.

For the user data, remember that if you mirror, you also mirror mistakes.  
Accidentally lost data on the original becomes lost data on the mirror.  
Instead, I'd recommend some system based on full backup, say monthly, and 
differential backups daily.  Several applications can handle that.

Anne

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