[Nolug] Network Backup Suggestions

Alright, heres the deal. My company deals with ghosting computers and
then installing them in K-12. We currently have about 250GB worth of
images and the majority of the people at the company are idiots when it
comes to computers to put it bluntly. There is one other tech that has
any intelligence at all and I am going to be working with him on this
project. It was our "brainchild". There is currently no backup
solution. I decided to go with FreeBSD for this job, first of all,
because people won't mess with it, if by chance they get access somehow
or other, and because I wanted something extreamly stable, so that no
one will have to reboot the machine every 7 or so days. The network
backup will be running on a Gig link straight into a dedicated NIC on
the ghosting server. The ghosting server is a Poweredge 2650, 2gigs of
ram, 2 p4 2.8mhz Xeon procs, 600GB HD space, and running server2003.
(Neccesary evil) The backup server is a poweredge 6300, 2gigs of ram,
quad p3 550mhz p3's. Now that you guys have the background information.

I'm going to use bacula as the network backup solution. For those of
you who aren't in the "know" http://www.bacula.org heres a bit to
educate. The first purpose of this is to document all the information
from this project, and help fellow nolugers learn. The second is that I
know this is way beyond the scope of anything i have done to date, and
while I know it can be accomplished. I defiantly need the knowledge of
a counsel. With all this in mind, let me say that I have barely given
the partitioning scheme a glance yet. I do plan on researching this
incredibly tonight, but in the mean time I wanted to get this out there.
  The server is dedicated to b backup, nothing more or less. It is
imparative that we implement a solution that works both well, and
efficiently. I'm looking for suggestions on how to set up the system,
and similar stories. Even if they are remotely related i am interested.
  If you have seen something like this done before, tell me about it.

The poweredge 6300 currently has 5 10 gig 10000rpm ultra160 drives in
it. Since we recently uped the hd space on the 2650 by inserting 4
146gb ultra320 drives, we had the old hard drives to use on the backup
server. these consist of 3 74gb 15000rpm ultra320 drives, and 1 36gb
15000 ultra320 drive. These will work in the backup server at ultra 160
speeds. There is another 146gb hd on the way that will be inserted into
the server at a later point. So thats where i stand now, as soon as i
am finished researching tonight i will send an update of how I plan on
configuring it, and you guys can tell me if i am way off base. Thanks
in advance for the help, and hopefully you guys will find this as
enjoyable to read about, as i find it to do.

Andy Adgate

___________________
Nolug mailing list
nolug@nolug.org
Received on 12/19/04