Server setup hints

[Chong Yu Meng]

On Sun, 2006-08-06 at 11:50 -0600, Collins Richey wrote:


> 2. What would be the "best" partitioning setup in terms of moderate
> performance (this will not be a barn burner site) and backup for the
> server? I'm thinking about a Raid 1 mirroring  environment to provide
> some recoverability? What do you think? How should the directories be
> split up? Problems with grub in a failover environment?
> 

Others will have alternative viewpoints, but my rule of thumb is this:

1. You need to identify which directories are going to expand at a rapid
rate. For example, for my Fedora system, /var is where all my logs go
and that used to fill up very quickly because of brute force SSH attacks
on the server (/var/log/secure used to have hundreds of entries in a
single day!). After I installed fail2ban however, that cut it down to
about 20 entries per day. If you run any service in verbose mode, your
logs will expand very quickly.

The last thing you want is for the logs to fill up the partition they
are in and cause your server to shutdown, or worse, hang up. I had that
happen to me on a server running ONLY OpenLDAP -- one boot and one root
partition only.So you'll probably want to put your logs in a separate
partition. 

IIRC, Oracle also needs 2 separate partitions (but that was back in 2000
-- not sure about now)

2. If this is your first server setup (or first Oracle setup), I'd
recommend a simple uniprocessor system with IDE hard disks, and budget
LOADS of time for repeated installations, because you probably won't get
everything right the first time (or the second, third, fourth ...),
unless Oracle has a document that describes, step-by-step, an
installation on Linux. You may want to learn about how to do a kickstart
install.

3. Also, be sure to document EVERYTHING ! You may be surprised at the
number of things you need to tune, including Apache! If you document
sporadically (like I used to do), you'll find yourself wondering why, on
the second-install, everything suddenly stops working.

4. For Oracle, your kernel parameters may need to be tuned, so there is
a possibility that your system may become unstable. Also, take note of
the gcc versions -- try to use only the version(s) recommended by
Oracle. 

5. Do not assume that this is going to be simple. Anything with Oracle
on it is far from simple, which is why, as someone mentioned, Oracle
DBAs earn so much money.
 

-- 
Pascal Chong 
email:  chongym at cymulacrum.net 
web:    http://cymulacrum.net
pgp:    http://cymulacrum.net/pgp/cymulacrum.asc

"La science ne conna?t pas de fronti?re parce que la connaissance
appartient ? l?humanit?. et que c?est la flamme qui illumine le monde."

-- Louis Pasteur
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