Stat Servers

See the Sustainable Computing page for keeping the workstation cycle going. That's the easy part. Keeping servers on a cycle is harder because they're larger lumps of money and they don't actually have to be added every year (but don't tell your boss that).

The disk space requirements for the user's area has grown at approximately 38% per year from 1997 through 2000. As more genticists are hired there will likely be an increase in the growth rate. Attempts should be made to upgrade disk space when you hit 75% usage, since the order will invariably take longer than expected.

CPU servers should have as many processors as possible, with additional RAM following closely in priority. Ideally faculty and grad students would have separate machines so that the faculty don't run into problems when the PhD students are doing heavy number crunching leading up to their dissertations.

Services should be easily separable from individual machines. To that end, mail goes to mailhost.stat.ufl.edu by MX record, and mailhost's IP can be changed easily. DNS service goes to name.stat.ufl.edu which is 128.227.141.30, but that is a secondary interface (/etc/hostname.hme0:1) which can be moved easily as well. The big difficulty currently is the hard-mounted /pkg1-3 from, mullet for most clients, which is not changeable without editing /etc/vfstab and rebooting on each client individually. A move to read-only auto-mounts of individual packages with redundant servers would alleviate that problem.

manatee.stat.ufl.edu Catastrophic failure 20000301
Model Enterprise-150 CPU 1 @ 167 MHZ RAM 128 Network 10/100 Mbps Services homes, pkg	Bus 1 Bus 0 . . . . . . 4GB (pkg3) 4GB (home3) 4GB (pkg2) 4GB (home2) 4GB (pkg1) died ? 2GB (boot) CD-ROM	Front | Back

Last modified: Mon Dec 4 11:10:15 EST 2000