[ale] Central server recommendations?

[Jim Lynch]

laytonjb at charter.net wrote:
> Good evening gang,
>
> I want to build a central server that is basically sort of a backup server. I want to
> keep copies of data from the household machines. I've even thought about using
> the machine as an NFS/CIFS server for the house. But, I really want to protect
> the data as best I can. So with that said I'm looking for some recommendations:
>
> 1. Backups: software and/or hardware recommendations? The data is likely to
> change fairly slowly. What about using DVD's for shorter term backup (less
> than 2 years)?
>   
Snapback2 http://www.perusion.com/misc/Snapback2/
Works for Linux only, if you have windows Bacula works, but it's tedious 
to configure.
> 2. RAID level? I'm not too worried about performance so perhaps RAID-6 or
> RAID-51? Any comments or recommendations about these with mdadm?
>   
Use two identical drives in a raid-1 configuration.  It's probably the 
slowest but still lots faster than any ethernet speeds.
> 3. Any hardware preferences for motherboard, etc? AMD dual-cores look too
> cheap to pass up at this time. I'm not fond of Nvidia chipsets, but I can
> easily pop in an Intel GigE NIC.
>   
No preference.  It's probably more important that it be a quality 
product than it be fast.
> 4. UPS recommendations? I would like something that will gracefully shutdown
> the server if a power failure is detected.
>   
I think most of the UPSs today have some kind of connection to allow a 
computer to sense power outages and take appropriate measures.  Just be 
sure if the UPS has a serial port, you select a mother board with one too. 
> Thanks!
>
> Jeff
>
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