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From: dillon@flea.best.net (Matt Dillon)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: FreeBSD hardware recommendation
Date: 17 Nov 1996 03:28:56 GMT
Organization: BEST Internet Communications, Inc.
Lines: 34
Message-ID: <56m0po$qnq@nntp1.best.com>
References: <56a5id$si0@is3.hk.super.net> <328D2BF7.352D@OntheNet.com.au>
NNTP-Posting-Host: flea.best.net
:In article <328D2BF7.352D@OntheNet.com.au>,
:Tony Griffiths <tonyg@OntheNet.com.au> wrote:
:>Eric Ho wrote:
:>>
:>> All,
:...
:>I think...
:>
:>> If possible, please reply to eho@fore.com. Thanks in advance!
:>>
:>By backup, do you mean Unix 'dump'. Sure, I backup my personal FreeBSD
:>system to DAT tape every couple of days using dump.
:>
:>I would never attempt to do this on the News or WWW proxy partitions.
:>The number of files in these filesystems is from ~ 200,000 per
:>filesystem for the two proxy partitions to > 600,000 in .../news and >
:>250,000 in .../news/alt ! Dump can't hack these sorts of numbers and it
:>is simply not worth trying to backup this ephemeral data anyway. If I
:>lose a disk (which I have done), it's back to newfs and a clean start.
:>
Not to mention that it can take 24 hours to rebuild a history file
from scratch and at least 8 hours to restore as 12GB+ news spool!
Even more! One will generally get many, many more complaints from
users from the down-time then if you simply wipe (newfs) the
news spool and start over. This is from experience...
Also, due to the turnover, backing up news with dump is not realistic.
If you are truely concerned, run two slaved news servers so if one
goes down you can shift everyone onto the other while allowing the
spool to rebuild itself over several days on the one that you lost.
-Matt