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OpenBSD CVS RAID Array Failing, Needs Replacement
Sam writes "The OpenBSD cvs server has a failing RAID array.
Users of the projects on that array:
OpenBSD,
OpenSSH,
OpenBGPD,
OpenNTPD,
and the upcoming
OpenCVS
are all invited to contribute towards the $12,500 cost of a suitably high-spec replacement.
OpenBSD Journal article, and original request (thread)."
I guess that it is a good thing that I decided to spend all day today compiling NetBSD instead of OpenBSD ... but, those projects are somewhat important, especially OpenSSH; if I were not a poor college student, I would contribute. Good luck.
The "BSD is dieing" jokes, riiiight after me!
its a joke, laugh.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
It is official; Netcraft confirms: OpenBSD's RAID is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered OpenBSD community when IDC confirmed that the OpenBSD RAID has failed again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent properly operating. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that OpenBSD's raid has lost more sectors, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. OpenBSD's RAID is collapsing into complete Redundant Disarray of Inexpensive Disks, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict OpenBSD's RAID's future. The hand writing is on the wall: OpenBSD's RAID faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for OpenBSD's RAID because OpenBSD's RAID is dying. Things are looking very bad for OpenBSD's RAID. As many of us are already aware, OpenBSD's RAID continues to data. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Fact: OpenBSD's RAID is dying
I think it's because they want quality equipment with a service contract. Your RAID enclosure built of duct tape and popsicle sticks fails to amuse.
How do we actually make a donation?
It would seem to me they could build one for significantly less. Dell's 4 hour service isn't as fast as having spare parts on-hand and swapping them yourself (someone has to be there to let Dell in so why can't they pull a harddrive sled and slide in a new one?). Plus the savings by building it themselves would more than cover the price of spare harddrives/controllers, etc...
That is just my experience. Dell's service/support is pretty good but I've had a significantly higher rate of failure on their hardware compared to purchasing components individually.
"If you want to help, paypal some money to slash at peereboom dot us, or you can use the OpenBSD ordering system. Be sure to mention its for the cvs machine."
What does the 'i' stand for in RAID?
Thanks.
A person that shall not be named donated a PERC4/DC RAID controller.
Lets go with "an anonymous benefactor" next time this comes up. I know, not anonymous to you.
It just sounds less like it "feel off a truck," you know?
While this is probably a dig at the cost of the project, many now say the 'i' stands for 'independent' rather than the original 'inexpensive.' There are good reasons to buy very large, high quality SCSI disks for a project like this.
while you've still got good data... take a backup first though... but shut it down...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I'll make an exceptional donation... I use OpenBSD on so many systems (now even on a SMP systen... yay!) that I owe Theo and Co.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
that you have an excellent sig. Ocaml rocks. :)
to accept the praise of personal wisdom is an affront to the very ideal i hold dear.
Well, by using the GPL you put your stuff under the wing of the FSF so that they can help to protect you. This way noone can pilfer said gonads without first going through the GPL and FSF; afterall, everyone has the fundamental right to access all gonads and it is best to protect said rights.
Perfect, then someone will come along and offer $50 000 for a BSD-licensed version, and then the project will be back under the same license as before. Except now it will have a new RAID, $37 500 in extra cash, plus whatever money and/or hardware you planned to donate. You're a genius!
> [...] You're a genius!
If the 50.000 offer were anything near serious, he definitely would be!
Grow your own pair and go out into the real world! ;)
"Protection"?.. What's that, The Godfather part IV?..
Noone's pilfering the gonads that are under one of the old, well-known, short, legalese-free and libertarian Academic Licenses (BSD, MIT).
If you use any OSS unix-like, or many OSS tools other than something with an Open* name, you are likely using at least a few things that have benefitted directly from the OpenBSD project. In an effort to keep OpenBSD secure, they contribute security patches to all sorts of software that runs on OpenBSD.
In particular, I'd encourage everyone who uses Linux to contribute.
After the $20k donation request for the Hackathon 2005, I think this one is a little bit more important ;)
Also, wouldn't this be a great project for a hardware manufacturer to donate (and get a tax write-off at the same time...)?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
bsd licence is even more FREE as the beer in gpl ...
:p
... and try to figure out why do we need gpl in the first place ?
so why would u like them to switch down on the freedom level ? so everyone who writes 2-liner patch to the app would have the responsibility to release the "patch" to the public just to apply to the gpl licence ?
just go and read both licences (bsd and gpl) , compare them 1:1
[zillion projects start out in gpl, and then turn into some kind of commercial crap anyway, change the gpl licence to some form of incorporate free-but-not-free licence etc. , so why bother pushing everything into a gpl that doesnt werk ?]
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
If you really believe in open source, this is a fine opportunity to show it.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
If Theo had kept his damn mouth shut and not driven away the NSF funding this would not be an issue. But why are they buying from DELL? Shouldn't they support corps that support them?
You can set up an AMD-64 with RAID under LINUX for $500 or less.
We're talking quality here. None of this SATA shit, which is great for the desktop, but not for much else.
And this is the OpenBSD project, it'll be running OpenBSD, not Linux.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
I thought Apple based OSX on BSD. Why aren't they flying to BSD's aid? Im actually quite surprised more big businesses aren't riddling the BSD community with money. I realize the whole OSS movement is built on the philosophy of "share and share alike", but blindly ripping the work of others without giving back is gross.
Since when is the BSD license "less open?" The FSF notes it is GPL-compatible & the OSI endorses it.
Also, the FSF believes everyone has the right to all code, thus anything that allows for a closed source version of anything denies the "right" to said code and is therefore bad.
Another note: The OSI are irrelevant, the only thing that matters for making something open source is there being access to the source; a little slip of words mean nothing, nor does the "thumbs up" from an organisation that does not contribute anything to the community, it is the access to the code that makes something open source by definition.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
Nope. Its because they insist in mostly oudated super expensive techology.
They could get the same or more with an IDE raid (a real one) at a fraction of those costs.
I completely agree. "oudated super expensive techology" is pointless.
DATA is DATA. IDE or SCSI.
You could have a very fast and nice RAID 5 (600Gig (5x200Gig HD) estimate) mini cluster (3 systems, each with RAID 5 - lets talk redundancy) for the same price. WTF are they thinking. Is "resistance to change(growup)" a problem? or maybe driver availability issues? What's their current COMPLETE detailed config. I want the specs for sure. seriously. What type NIC, what M/B, processor, RAM, are they using.. Everything!
There have been no OpenBSD vs posts yet.
hmm, let's look at the facts
the person organizing the replacement (marco@) works with at lowest level of disks as a day job. he is very involved in all of the obsd scsi stuff
you agree that scsi is "outdated super expensive technology", but offer no facts, nor have you bothered to check the configuration they currently have
who should i consider more knowledgable in this subject matter?
for the kind of work that cvs.openbsd.org does, ide simply will not cut it
for storing big pr0n movies, ide works fine. for lots of cvs commits and checkouts and heavy i/o from nfs, ide sucks
vodka, straight up, thank you!
I'd mod you up if I had the opportunity. marco@ is brilliant when it comes storage.
The meme police, They live inside of my head
_ ??
hmmm... dumb...
Marco may be as brilliant as God the Almighty ... but that doesn't change facts. SCSI drives and SCSI based arrays are currently in the process of becoming a high end niche product.
Especially against good caching SATA arrays you will have a hard time to even state a convincing performance case, not to mention one based on costs.
Im not arguing those are better. I argue he doesn't need those extra 10 or what percent faster seek times. Over all system design is more than knowing disk to the last atoms. If Marco is responsible fr this design, he confused his desire to have superior Hard drives with his project's desire to maximise a price-performance ratio under a given minimum performance requirement.
> IDE drives have been beating SCSI hands down on this for years now.
p lay/i de-scsi.html /. code)
You are right - four IDE drives can beat one SCSI drive hands on.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/dis
(there's no space between "i" and "de-scsi.html; it's the stupid
> The real stated advantage of SCSI drives is seek time.
And what about MTBF?
> They just have some CVS server
I'd guess CVS server has workload similar to database (many small reads, a bit less small writes) which isn't suitable at all for IDE disks.
So what you are saying is that he's already "close minded" to anything other then SCSI? and that what he thinks is good for project may not be in the best interest, cost wise, for the project?
Don't feed the damn troll, man.
Network Appliance a.k.a NetApp is noticeably absent from the OpenBSD donations page (www.openbsd.org/donations.html). Anyone who uses a NetApp knows immediately that the OnTap OS is BSD, always has been BSD.
Considering the Billions (yes, Billions) of dollars in revenue NetApp has derived from the BSDs, I am appalled at the company's lack of contribution back to the BSD community!
Considering that a good number of their founders, engineers, and developers were educated at Berkeley (yes the B in BSD), I am doubly appalled at the company's lack of contribution!
Now OpenBSD is looking for some storage and NetApp sits by while a POS Dell array is considered? You know, Dell, as in EMC's (NetApp's biggest competitor) biggest partner!
HELLO? NetApp? HELLO? You should make sure that all the BSDs host their CVS repositories on NetApp, a nice BSD based platform.
FWIW... Yes, I contribute. I have standing subscriptions and kick in a few extra bucks when needed.
How do you explain away the access time difference between 15k and 10k rpm drives? They probably want one big array with lots of 15k rpm drives to get a lot of fast spindles to achieve fast random IO.
ostiguy
IDE ? I take it you don't work in the data storage field otherwise you wouldn't suggest putting live filesystems for critical data on consumer grade devices. The reason data centres use SCSI and FC is not because they are faster ...
The money has been raised, the purchase shall soon be made. The link is here and you will note that the only companies that put in any money are smaller ones and the rest of the money has come from individuals.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
I think in your whole mini-rant you managed to get one fact right : seek time being important for apps.
:-)
... why do clued up sys admins use SCSI/FC disks for server applications when you can buy bigger/faster/cheaper IDE disks instead ? (ignoring seektimes and command queuing etc)
... reliability. A server class disk is designed to run for years on end and be thrashed constantly, hence they are built to be more reliable than their desktop cousins. The interface used to connect them to the host is also more reliable, has more error checking and correction, is usually even made of better materials .. in all you get what you pay for!
... for on-line storage of sev-1 applications it's not so great.
:-)
The rest was garbage
Have a think about this
It's really a simple answer you know
IDE/ATA/S-ATA is great for desktop use and for nearline storage devices (low activity archives)
Just a few tidbits of knowledge I've picked up in 10 years of data storage management
Also, it was hard to get money from companies, and almost everything seems to have come from caring individuals: message here
It's 11pm, do you know what your deamons are up to?
After the project switches to the GPL, I suspect you'll choose to donate in Stallman dollars. But don't forget to also publish your printing plates and make them available for anyone who asks, that's required under the Stallman-dollar GPL.
Come on, even flames need to uphold a minimum standard of common sense. Why should OpenBSD change their license first? Why not the U.S Treasury instead, the other half of the exchange you propose?
Arguably, GPL software is more Free (with a capital F) while BSD software is more Open. I say arguably because people have been arguing about this shit on slashdot for ages (myself included.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
dell hardware is incredibly poor quality compared to other vendors, their support is also very poor.
In terms of quality dell is comparable to the cheapest of asian vendors, but somehow people believe them to be superior just because they're american. This is just not the case, i have had no end of trouble from dell machines. I also don't like dell's closeness to microsoft and their willingness to drop linux so quickly, also the fact they take steps to render some of their systems incompatible with non windows os's (real example: update the bios on an inspiron 2600 laptop to the latest version and then try running X11 under any opensource os)
I am dismayed to see openbsd giving money to dell when dell do nothing to help openbsd. They should be supporting vendors who support their os.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by bureacratic friction.
It's a lot easier for individuals to "cut a check" quickly than for any but the smallest company.