The story so far:
Hardware:
So far, no SCSI issues. The installers I've tested see the drive using
the (I think) aic7xxx driver. So far, so good. It Just Works(tm).
I've dropped in an extra 20GB IDE drive into the system. I am strongly
considering setting up this system with LVM to make life easier in the
future. The Gentoo LVM HOWTO has some good info on planning partition
sizes. In a nutshell, it recommends a small boot and swap partitions,
putting /opt, /usr, /home, /var, and /tmp in an LVM volume group, and
keeping /etc, /lib, /mnt, /proc, /sbin, /dev, and /root OUT of the LVM,
to keep the system bootable if the worst should happen.
Alternatively, I may do three boot-root-swap partitions on the IDE drive
and just use the entire SCSI disk for /var. Hmm, /home as well, makes
sense. Whatever FTP server I use, I should be able to configure it to
use /var, right?
As for choice of file systems, I'm going with the following: boot, ext2;
/var, ReiserFS; everything else, ext3. Any thoughts on this? I
understand that Reiser is good for lots of smaller files- seems right
for the main storage of web/mail data.
Okay, here's my current partitioning scheme as I work through a test
Debian install.
IDE:
50MB ext2 /boot
1GB SWAP Swap partition
10GB ext3 /
8.9GB LVM LVM physical volume
SCSI:
18.2GB LVM LVM physical volume
I'll likely stick just /home, /var, and /tmp in the LVM as one big
(~25GB) Resier volume. Still reading docco, though.
ObLink:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/lvm2.xml
I will finalize the issue of having a second proc by Monday at the
latest. If I can't find one by then, I'm going to go ahead with running
the system in uniproc mode. But, after all, this will just be a home
machine with just a few users. I may throw Samba on it, use it as a
fileserver, but any MP3/backup box I would have would likely be a
separate machine with mondo disk space.
You're right, Kevin. This box should be plenty beefy for regular usage-
it's the Gentoo factor that I'm considering- see below.
Finally, I dub this machine "stevemartin." I can't reliably spell
"Hfuhruhurr."
Distros:
As of this moment, it's a toss-up between Debian and Gentoo. Thanks to
Mark for pointing me at a relatively painless Debian installer ISO. A
big plus in my mind right now is the fact that Debian-installer is
LVM-aware and has the 2.6 kernel. (see above for partitions)
The final decision largely depends on my getting a second proc in the
immediate future. I've done a relatively straightforward stage 3 Gentoo
install before, on my P200 laptop, so I know I can follow directions-
I'm not worried about the details, just the very real issue of compile time.
I will use the 2.6 kernel, just for l33tness' sake.
MTA:
Still a little up in the air here. I've ruled out sendmail because of
security issues and exim because of a lack of information, feedback,
support, and confidence. This leaves the decision between postfix and
qmail. The Rocks Project (thanks, David) has tons of documentation for
qmail, which is a big plus. I keep hearing reports of postfix being easy
to manage, but I haven't looked closely enough.
Can anybody talk about procmail or mimedefang? Do I want to use either
of these?
Web server:
Apache 2, baby. Let's be cutting-edge for something. Any PHP eye candy
I'd want to use will likely play nice with the latest and greatest. It
is a low priority right now- my content (all fifteen words of it) is
static. This does make life easier.
Behind the scenes:
I plan to set up new DNS service today/tomorrow.
Jeremy: Yes, I've used Xname before, but only as a secondary. I expect
for this move that I will hop onto an actual DNS server to use as my
primary. That may change in the future, or towards the end of the week.
Yikes, five days left. I'm not sure how much testing I'll be able to get
done!
MDK
PS: Joey, I don't mean to steal thunder from your last presentation
idea, but I'm under real-world pressure by extrnal forces.
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Received on 11/07/04
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