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This is basically a section where I stuff all the bits I have not yet
decided where should go, yet that I feel is worth knowing about. It is
a kind of transient area.
In many cases you do not need a swap partition, for instance if you
have plenty of RAM, say, more than 64 MB, and you are the sole user
of the machine. In this case you can experiment running without a
swap partition and check the system logs to see if you ran out of
virtual memory at any point.
Removing swap partitions have two advantages:
- you save disk space (rather obvious really)
- you save seek time as swap partitions otherwise would
lie in the middle of your disk space.
In the end, having a swap partition is like having a heated toilet:
you do not use it very often, but you sure appreciate it when
you require it.
In an earlier version of this document I proposed to put all
permanently mounted partitions under /mnt. That, however, is
not such a good idea as this itself can be used as a mount point, which
leads to all mounted partitions becoming unavailable. Instead I will
propose mounting straight from root using a meaningful name like
/mnt.descriptive-name.
Lately I have become aware that some Linux distributions use mount points
at subdirectories under /mnt, such as /mnt/floppy
and /mnt/cdrom, which just shows how confused the whole issue is.
Hopefully FHS should clarify this.
Not many years ago a machine with the equivalent power of a modern PC
required 3-phase power and cooling, usually by air conditioning the machine
room, some times also by water cooling. Technology has progressed very
quickly giving not only high speed but also low power components. Still,
there is a definite limit to the technology, something one should keep in
mind as the system is expanded with yet another disk drive or PCI
card. When the power supply is running at full rated power, keep in mind
that all this energy is going somewhere, mostly into heat. Unless this is
dissipated using fans you will get a serious heating inside the cabinet
followed by a reduced reliability and also life time of the electronics.
Manufacturers state minimum cooling requirements for their drives, usually
in terms of cubic feet per minute (CFM). You are well advised to take this
serious.
Keep air flow passages open, clean out dust and check the temperature of your
system running. If it is too hot to touch it is probably running too hot.
If possible use sequential spin up for the drives. It is during
spin up, when the drive platters accelerate up to normal speed,
that a drive consumes maximum power and if all drives start up
simultaneously you could go beyond the rated power maximum of
your power supply.
This is an Internet system that no doubt most of you are familiar with.
It searches and serves Usenet News articles from 1995 and to the
latest postings and also offers a web based reading and posting interface.
There is a lot more, check out
Deja
for more information. It changed name from Dejanews.
What perhaps is less known, is that they use about 120 Linux SMP
computers many of which use the md module to manage between 4
and 24 Gig of disk space (over 1200 Gig altogether) for this service.
The system is continuously growing but at the time of writing they
use mostly dual Pentium Pro 200MHz and Pentium II 300 MHz
systems with 256 MB RAM or more.
A production database machine normally has 1 disk for the operating system and
between 4 and 6 disks managed by the md module where the articles are
archived.
The drives are connected to BusLogic Model BT-946C and BT-958
PCI SCSI adapters, usually one to a machine.
For the production
systems (which are up 365 days a year) the downtime attributable to
disk errors is less than 0.25 % (that is a quarter of 1%, not 25%).
Just in case: this is not an advertisement, it is stated as an
example of how much is required for what is a major Internet
service.
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