Ians todo list

Contents:

Hard disks
Rhun
ReiserFS replacement

Some things I should get around to some day...

Hard disks

Planned for early in 2007 after it took a while to obtain the 120G disk

Zoe was finally upgraded with a 120G disk on 2008-04-14. The second part of this plan remains.

Low-level format the 60G disk and put it in Taliesin.
Copy over the root filesystem and boot from it.
Make a RAID-1 volume on the 60G disk and copy the rest of the data into that.
Take out the old 14G disk.
Low-level format one of the other 45/46G disks and put it in Taliesin.
Add it to the RAID-1 volume.

Result: ~45G of RAID-1 protected storage, up from an old single 14G disk!

Move data and services around:

Move the Subversion repository and Trac to the faster Taliesin. Have a unified ‘ian’ website, with /svn and /trac URL's.
Move some other junk onto Zoe.
Move LDAP and Kerberos KDC to Zoe?
Move web proxy/cache to Zoe?
Test out OpenAFS with a cell distributed over Taliesin, Zoe, and Mars.

The idea is to make Zoe the “file server” and Taliesin the “compute server”. Although Taliesin is definitely the more capable of the two, some attempt should be made to balance the load between them. i.e some moderately CPU-heavy services on Zoe, and some IO-heavy services on Taliesin.

Rhun

Sun SPARCstation LX with 128MiB of RAM and 4.3GiB disk

I must decide what to do with this old machine. What can be done with it?

Hook up the SCSI enclosure and use it for a RAID. Not very efficient though - 6 or 7 × 4.3GiB disks for a measly 20GiB or so. And not very fast.
Use the DAT tape drive for backups. The tape drive could possibly be installed in the case, replacing the floppy drive. Still not very fast.
Hook it up to a monitor and use it to display information e.g network graph, temperature readings, etc.
Try a mini-ITX conversion. Bye bye 40Mhz microSPARC...

ReiserFS replacement

Continue replacing ReiserFS with XFS on Linux systems.

ReiserFS (version 3) is a good fs but its development reached maintenance mode many years ago and it lacks a proper defragmenter. Reiser4 has (or is meant to have) an online “re-packer”. But it had some oddball features that the Linux kernel developers objected to. With the incarceration of Hans Reiser, its future looks uncertain.

XFS was created by Silicon Graphics and continues to be maintained by them. It has a good history of use in large, serious installations. It has an online “reorganiser”, although it is rather simple.

Done:

data (91 GiB) on Saavik
root (4.5 GiB), IansMedia (32 GiB), and Safe2 (2.9 GiB) on Zoe

To do:

root on Saavik (6.6 GiB), Taliesin (8.6 GiB), and Baal (2.0 GiB)
root (5.4 GiB) and mythtv (172 GiB) on Buster