If you use just one hard drive, that might be true. These days, though, most people with those sorts of storage transfer issues have RAID-5 sources.
RAID 10 is a lot more popular in data centers. With RAID6 running a close second.
RAID5 (and RAID6) has crappy rebuild times (the more disks in the array, the longer it takes to rebuild). Which means that the chance of a double-failure killing the entire array during your recovery window go up as you add more disks.
RAID 10 recovery windows are based on the size of an individual disk in the array. Doesn't matter if you have a 4-disk array or 16-disk array. A rebuild of a failed drive always takes the same amount of time. It's basically RAID0 laid over top of a bunch of RAID1 mirror sets. Each mirror set gets rebuild individually.
You can even do interesting things with RAID10 where you put the RAID0 over top of triple-mirrored RAID1. (Three disks per RAID1 element. Which means you have to lose three disks before the array crashes.) Granted, it's not very space efficient when you do that (33% net space), but could be useful for the truly paranoid.
Other then that... yes, RAID 0/5/6/10 does a wonderful job of filling up network pipes and giving you a higher sustained transfer rate then a single disk could provide.
Just because a drug is labeled "non-addicting" does not mean that you won't encounter withdrawal symptoms if you stop taking it suddenly.
(For example, EffexorXR is said to be "non-addictive", but going off your dose suddenly will bring on withdrawal pangs. Which is a fairly well-known issue in the community and why it usually takes 3-6 weeks to taper off.)
I've grown skeptical of depression when a doctor told me that half of people have it passed on from the genes. If one of your parents have it, there is a 50% chance it is passed on. It's higher of both parents have it.
There's good evidence that mental illness (including depression and bi-polar) run in families. We're talking the chemical imbalance version of illness which has a pretty strong genetic component.
(And the genetics issue raises a lot of interesting questions and possible explanations for past behavior by others in my family.)
A big problem with being depressed is that you can't see a way out, you lose hope, and get even more depressed. If someone who's depressed sees a way out, they can have hope, which further improves their ability to recover. There are a lot of self-perpetuating cycles involved in depression.
Or, to put it simpler... when it comes to depression, you are your own worst enemy.
(I've dealt / suffered with the disease for over 25 years. Probably closer to 30 based on my memory of thoughts and feelings when I was in school. Completely undiagnosed and untreated until a few years ago. Laying awake every night and wrestling with the idea that (a) suicide seems like a viable solution and (b) thinking about methods of carrying it out are pretty good self-evidence of the issue.)
No more so then "daemons" do. Or Norton Ghost. Well, I'll at least posit that more people are offended by a product named "gimp" then one named "imp". Especially if the "imp" logo is cute.
Depends on which Tecra. The tablet models probably won't fare as well as the traditional Tecra 8000 / 8100 / 9100 series did.
The average age for our Tecras is around 4-5 years and they're still in use as primary machines. I used mine for 5 years (an old P4 1.7GHz with 1GB RAM). It worked, it survived many trips, had the keyboard, mouse buttons and backlight replaced and went through two hard drives.
But it was definitely getting close to the end of its lifespan after year four.
I've been using a widescreen Thinkpad T61 for about 6 months now. And my opinion is that even the Toshiba Tecras can't compete with it for sheer sturdiness. This thing feels much more solid.
Who the f- leaves their browser open and running for weeks?!?
Those of us who need to do real work on projects that may take a few days to work through.
I almost always have at least 5 Firefox windows (each with 10-30 tabs open). One window for the corporate web applications. The others for reading documentation, testing out a project, or doing other research.
It makes zero sense to shut the browser down, when I'll be back referencing it or interacting with it 15 minutes from now. Or a client will call and have me check on something, so I fire up yet another window.
1) The price needs to come down. A lot. $400 is just waaaay to much to make these things ubiquitous. Think about attractive one of these might be at $50. It would be hard to resist.
If you look around, you can pickup something like the Sony PRS-505 for under $300. Which is a good bit less then $400 and was inexpensive enough for me to say "I'll try it".
2) Lose the DRM / stop with the proprietary formats. Books, even more so than software, yearn to be free.
Books don't yearn to be free. They're inanimate objects. YOU might wish that they were free. (Personally, my only objection with copyright is that it's been extended way too far and should be trimmed back to 20 years after first publish date.)
As for DRM-free content, there's a good bit of it out there (all of Baen's e-books are sold without DRM) plus all the stuff from Project Gutenberg.
3) Major publishers and popular authors need to get on board. Unless the authors who people really want to read are available, the whole exercise is sort of pointless.
Between Amazon's Kindle and Sony's reader, there's a lot of popular stuff for sale. Unfortunately, a lot of it is DRM'd.
(And while I may eventually buy some DRM content... I'll probably try to exhaust all of the non-DRM content first.)
Baen's success in giving books away came from releasing the first books in a series for free when later volumes come out.
On the commercial side, the fact that they sell their eBooks for a reasonable price and without DRM is what makes me happy. While I may take advantage of the free library, I'm very content at the moment to be reading some zero-DRM books that I bought from their store.
To ordinary people, even 'ordinary' slashdot-readers, a 'workstation' is some 'station' (a desk with a computer) that you do your 'work' on.
Well, even just a few years ago "workstation" implies a computer that is more powerful then a normal desktop computer. Or which is designed for a specific purpose. Such as "sun workstations" or "CAD workstations".
Workstations typically have ECC memory and are just beefier all around (including cost) and are used by folks where time = money.
(It's a marketing term that has been in use since the mid-90s, if not earlier.)
I am all for more security. But, if it slows my laptop down to the point of un-usability....
There will be a performance hit, but my plan is to:
1) Make two backups of my entire disk with something like Acronis TrueImage. That way, if I decide I don't want to stick with full-disk encryption, I can revert back easily.
2) Leave my backup drives unencrypted. My primary worry is that someone swipes the laptop. So I use something like Second Copy to write data files off to a regular USB external drive periodically in the office.
I've used older TrueCrypt volumes in the past. They're extremely handy. I use them on my laptop to store select documents in a secure location. Combined with a bit of GPG, and I can lock up secrets fairly well.
Speed of regular TrueCrypt volumes doesn't seem to be an issue. I've seen 15-25 MB/s transfer speeds when copying between two different TC volumes (on two different spindles).
With the advent of air bags in steering wheels, you may want to reconsider how close you sit to the steering wheel.
My memory is fuzzy, but I think we were taught (back in the 80s) to put our hands at 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock. Now that airbags are in the center of the wheel, I think the advice is now to have your hands down at 8 o'clock and 4 o'clock (or 9 and 3).
There is something to be said for that. As long as you remember the limits of the medium.
If you do pickup-groups (PuGs), you'll be grouping with 4 other strangers who have different motivations and styles, and the 5 of you will need to figure out how to accomplish objectives without stepping on each other.
Sometimes, that works well. Other times, it results in constant party deaths (a.k.a. "wipes" where everyone dies and you spend 15 minutes getting back to where you were), or flaring tempers, trampled egos, or fights over a piece of loot that will be replaced two weeks later. So either you learn how to work within a dysfunctional group and still get things accomplished, or else you spend your days soloing.
Some of the things that can be learned:
- How to lead, without being bossy or overbearing
- Picking up on other people's motives (good or bad)
- Adjusting for a different style
- Working together
- Dealing with disappointment without freaking out
- Interacting with complete strangers
I'd like something that was point to point without a server in the middle. The messages are encrypted so ISPs can't peak in and all logging is left up to the parties involved in the conversation.
Unfortunately, secure key exchange between random parties is a very difficult problem to solve.
However, Jabber/XMPP streams can be encrypted with TLS/SSL, so all of your traffic between you and your server (and between servers) can be encrypted.
Most raw materials are worth more than anything you can craft out of them.
The reason for this is that there are high-level items (Primal Mooncloth, etc) that a crafter can create for themselves. A lot of people wait until 60-70 to start working on their crafting skills in order to create those items. Which means that at low levels, you're competing against level 70s on the Auction House for materials. Since a L70 has a *lot* more gold then you do and can make it a lot easier and a lot faster, guess who ends up setting the Auction House price?
(Which is basically that, as a low level crafter, you're not the customer demographic that the sellers of raw materials are competing for. They're going to sell to whoever is willing to pay them the highest price.)
Low-level items are either useless and impossible to sell, or--if useful--people with high level alts have priced them at a range no new-user can ever afford.
There's almost no such thing as a useless item (greens/blues/purples) in WoW. Even if it doesn't have optimal stats, wear it! Or sell it, or disenchant it. Stop worrying about having the "best" gear, as long as you have "good enough" gear, you'll do fine until you start hitting the 10/25/40 man raid instances in the end-game.
If you're pissed off about prices on the Auction House - don't buy gear there! Go out, adventure, and see what drops of its own accord. Go look for quests that reward you with gear (75% of them are soloable, the rest are probably being worked on by half a dozen other people who will gladly group up to complete it). In the meantime, take advantage of the outrageous AH prices by selling any good gear that you find there. Take advantage of someone else's greed and net yourself a little coin.
Raw materials + labor should always have greater value than the raw materials alone, for example.
You can hold your breath and wish all you want, but when the creation of an item takes no more effort then putting the items in your bag and hitting "create", it is *never* going to happen. EQ2 tried this approach (you had to "combat" with the crafting system in order to create items of the highest quality and stats) where it would take you an hour to create a stack of food. Sure, it resulted in higher prices for finished crafted goods, but eventually crafters got bored so they changed the system.
And overall, I'd argue that the economy in WoW is mostly working. You obtain loot drop X which you wish to exchange for loot drop Y. If "X" is worth more then "Y" on the AH, you'll have no problems. If "X" is worth less then "Y", you'll need to go obtain additional loot drops in order to afford item "Y".
It's blurry as shit and obnoxious to watch unless you have a newer DVD in there. Older DVDs -- which he has more than a few -- look like ass on there because it won't upconvert them to anything near the 1080 it will do. Newer DVDs, like his copy of Ratatouille looked fine upconverted to 1080.
Which has nothing to do with the age of the DVD or inability to upconvert, but is more an issue that early DVDs were encoded at lower then desirable bitrates. (Okay, some of the early encoders weren't the best either.) But even back in 96/97/98 (?) there were DVDs released as "SuperBit" releases where they trimmed ads and extras off the disk and gave it a higher bitrate.
There also may have been a few DVDs that were encoded as half-frames (360x480 a.k.a. half-D1?) instead of full-frame (720x480).
Tried it for 2-3 years (Gentoo on servers), gave up and have switched to CentOS/RedHat.
I loved Gentoo as a way to learn about Linux on the server. But the project has been seemingly adrift for a while, so we're making the move away from it. That, and it's a bit too fiddly on servers for our tastes. (It seems like it should be a no-brainer for servers, but ultimately it's not quite stable enough.)
Ok, but how cheap can you make your file server and still get good performance out of it?
With modern motherboards (which means PCIe with the SATA ports not running through the old PCI controller), Software RAID is perfectly viable for saturating a 1Gbit NIC. And probably with enough disks, capable of saturating 2 or 3 gigabit NICs.
Basically, take a motherboard like Asus M2N-E (with 6+ SATA plugs), the $75 Athlon64 X2 chip, and 2GB of RAM and you'll have pretty much an overkill system for not a whole lot of cash. Something like the 45W X2s with that motherboard will cost around $225 in a bundle from some place like MWave.
If, under heavy disk / network load, you manage to hit 10% on the CPU meters, I would be surprised.
So basically $225 for the CPU/MB/RAM, $100 for the case and PSU, and as many hard drives as you can manage to cram inside a case. You can go cheaper, but going too cheap is counter-productive (failed PSUs, cases with inadequate ventilation, etc. can shorten component life).
My preference for home servers of the fire-and-forget variety is to do RAID1 across 3 disks. That means RAID'ing all partitions (including the swap partition).
Why 3 disks? Because home setups tend to get looked at maybe once a month, and a lot of folks forget to turn on mdadm array monitoring or to setup the box as a postfix null server so that it can e-mail out reports. With the 3rd disk, you have a much larger window during which to discover a drive failure before you lose everything.
(And if you're going to put 3 disks in, instead of doing 2 plus a hot spare, why not put that disk to work?)
RAID5 may be nice for having more net space, but again, home servers typically are skimpy on backups and the rebuild time for RAID5 is not nice. So keep it simple and go with RAID1, where you can pull data easily off of any of the 2 or 3 disks in the array.
Having a second for fail-over might be wise if it's really important, but if all you're running on a server is NTP then you're probably down to just hardware failure to worry about.
A man with two clocks is never quite sure what time it is.
Either run one server or four-plus servers. With four servers, your clients (who should reference all four servers) can deal with a single server failure (leaving them 3) and still figure out if one of the servers is "insane".
With 2 servers, your clients are going to be hopelessly lost at figuring out which server is serving up "better" time.
Three servers works fine, until one fails, leaving your clients in the 2-server (which is right?) dilemma.
Under GNU/Linux, the local clock may be used to initialize the kernel clock, but those two run independently of each other until shutdown (or manual set). Only then the local clock is set to the kernel time, regardless of what the local clock was doing all the time.
You're confusing your terminology (I think). Local clock in NTP is used to refer to the kernel clock. What you're thinking of is the difference between the hardware (BIOS) clock and the kernel/software clock. Under GNU/Linux, the hardware clock is only referenced at startup with the option to write the software clock time to the hardware clock when you shutdown.
NTP disciplines the local/kernel clock while the system is then running.
Slashdot Mirror
If you use just one hard drive, that might be true. These days, though, most people with those sorts of storage transfer issues have RAID-5 sources.
RAID 10 is a lot more popular in data centers. With RAID6 running a close second.
RAID5 (and RAID6) has crappy rebuild times (the more disks in the array, the longer it takes to rebuild). Which means that the chance of a double-failure killing the entire array during your recovery window go up as you add more disks.
RAID 10 recovery windows are based on the size of an individual disk in the array. Doesn't matter if you have a 4-disk array or 16-disk array. A rebuild of a failed drive always takes the same amount of time. It's basically RAID0 laid over top of a bunch of RAID1 mirror sets. Each mirror set gets rebuild individually.
You can even do interesting things with RAID10 where you put the RAID0 over top of triple-mirrored RAID1. (Three disks per RAID1 element. Which means you have to lose three disks before the array crashes.) Granted, it's not very space efficient when you do that (33% net space), but could be useful for the truly paranoid.
Other then that... yes, RAID 0/5/6/10 does a wonderful job of filling up network pipes and giving you a higher sustained transfer rate then a single disk could provide.
One note on "non-addicting".
Just because a drug is labeled "non-addicting" does not mean that you won't encounter withdrawal symptoms if you stop taking it suddenly.
(For example, EffexorXR is said to be "non-addictive", but going off your dose suddenly will bring on withdrawal pangs. Which is a fairly well-known issue in the community and why it usually takes 3-6 weeks to taper off.)
I've grown skeptical of depression when a doctor told me that half of people have it passed on from the genes. If one of your parents have it, there is a 50% chance it is passed on. It's higher of both parents have it.
There's good evidence that mental illness (including depression and bi-polar) run in families. We're talking the chemical imbalance version of illness which has a pretty strong genetic component.
(And the genetics issue raises a lot of interesting questions and possible explanations for past behavior by others in my family.)
A big problem with being depressed is that you can't see a way out, you lose hope, and get even more depressed. If someone who's depressed sees a way out, they can have hope, which further improves their ability to recover. There are a lot of self-perpetuating cycles involved in depression.
Or, to put it simpler... when it comes to depression, you are your own worst enemy.
(I've dealt / suffered with the disease for over 25 years. Probably closer to 30 based on my memory of thoughts and feelings when I was in school. Completely undiagnosed and untreated until a few years ago. Laying awake every night and wrestling with the idea that (a) suicide seems like a viable solution and (b) thinking about methods of carrying it out are pretty good self-evidence of the issue.)
No more so then "daemons" do. Or Norton Ghost. Well, I'll at least posit that more people are offended by a product named "gimp" then one named "imp". Especially if the "imp" logo is cute.
It's called The GIMP! I use that program all the time, it does most of the stuff Photoshop does. First post :)
And unfortunately, the name "GIMP" is horrible. The last user that I installed it for complained that "gimp" is a slur on handicapped people.
I wish they'd change the name to "GNU IMP" or drop the "G" at the front, or something.
Depends on which Tecra. The tablet models probably won't fare as well as the traditional Tecra 8000 / 8100 / 9100 series did.
The average age for our Tecras is around 4-5 years and they're still in use as primary machines. I used mine for 5 years (an old P4 1.7GHz with 1GB RAM). It worked, it survived many trips, had the keyboard, mouse buttons and backlight replaced and went through two hard drives.
But it was definitely getting close to the end of its lifespan after year four.
I've been using a widescreen Thinkpad T61 for about 6 months now. And my opinion is that even the Toshiba Tecras can't compete with it for sheer sturdiness. This thing feels much more solid.
Who the f- leaves their browser open and running for weeks?!?
Those of us who need to do real work on projects that may take a few days to work through.
I almost always have at least 5 Firefox windows (each with 10-30 tabs open). One window for the corporate web applications. The others for reading documentation, testing out a project, or doing other research.
It makes zero sense to shut the browser down, when I'll be back referencing it or interacting with it 15 minutes from now. Or a client will call and have me check on something, so I fire up yet another window.
1) The price needs to come down. A lot. $400 is just waaaay to much to make these things ubiquitous. Think about attractive one of these might be at $50. It would be hard to resist.
If you look around, you can pickup something like the Sony PRS-505 for under $300. Which is a good bit less then $400 and was inexpensive enough for me to say "I'll try it".
2) Lose the DRM / stop with the proprietary formats. Books, even more so than software, yearn to be free.
Books don't yearn to be free. They're inanimate objects. YOU might wish that they were free. (Personally, my only objection with copyright is that it's been extended way too far and should be trimmed back to 20 years after first publish date.)
As for DRM-free content, there's a good bit of it out there (all of Baen's e-books are sold without DRM) plus all the stuff from Project Gutenberg.
3) Major publishers and popular authors need to get on board. Unless the authors who people really want to read are available, the whole exercise is sort of pointless.
Between Amazon's Kindle and Sony's reader, there's a lot of popular stuff for sale. Unfortunately, a lot of it is DRM'd.
(And while I may eventually buy some DRM content... I'll probably try to exhaust all of the non-DRM content first.)
Baen's success in giving books away came from releasing the first books in a series for free when later volumes come out.
On the commercial side, the fact that they sell their eBooks for a reasonable price and without DRM is what makes me happy. While I may take advantage of the free library, I'm very content at the moment to be reading some zero-DRM books that I bought from their store.
(Using a Sony PRS-505... and very happy.)
To ordinary people, even 'ordinary' slashdot-readers, a 'workstation' is some 'station' (a desk with a computer) that you do your 'work' on.
Well, even just a few years ago "workstation" implies a computer that is more powerful then a normal desktop computer. Or which is designed for a specific purpose. Such as "sun workstations" or "CAD workstations".
Workstations typically have ECC memory and are just beefier all around (including cost) and are used by folks where time = money.
(It's a marketing term that has been in use since the mid-90s, if not earlier.)
I am all for more security. But, if it slows my laptop down to the point of un-usability....
There will be a performance hit, but my plan is to:
1) Make two backups of my entire disk with something like Acronis TrueImage. That way, if I decide I don't want to stick with full-disk encryption, I can revert back easily.
2) Leave my backup drives unencrypted. My primary worry is that someone swipes the laptop. So I use something like Second Copy to write data files off to a regular USB external drive periodically in the office.
I've used older TrueCrypt volumes in the past. They're extremely handy. I use them on my laptop to store select documents in a secure location. Combined with a bit of GPG, and I can lock up secrets fairly well.
Speed of regular TrueCrypt volumes doesn't seem to be an issue. I've seen 15-25 MB/s transfer speeds when copying between two different TC volumes (on two different spindles).
We use Pandion for our Windows XP boxes at work to talk to our XMPP/Jabber server. There's also Spark, Miranda, OS X's iChat...
Hell, I'm just happy that I don't have to track license counts any more (like I did with e/pop Professional).
You must have gotten that Motorola Q from someone other than Verizon
I have a Motorola Q and have no problems using any old USB cable with it.
I even use the same USB cable to interface with my Sony PRS-505.
With the advent of air bags in steering wheels, you may want to reconsider how close you sit to the steering wheel.
My memory is fuzzy, but I think we were taught (back in the 80s) to put our hands at 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock. Now that airbags are in the center of the wheel, I think the advice is now to have your hands down at 8 o'clock and 4 o'clock (or 9 and 3).
I just moved my ssh server to a random port. No more brute force ssh attacks.
We do that too for our internet-facing servers. It cuts the chatter in the log files *way* down.
(We also require the use of public keys in order to authenticate via SSH2. Moving the SSH port was mostly to just reduce the noise in the log files.)
There is something to be said for that. As long as you remember the limits of the medium.
If you do pickup-groups (PuGs), you'll be grouping with 4 other strangers who have different motivations and styles, and the 5 of you will need to figure out how to accomplish objectives without stepping on each other.
Sometimes, that works well. Other times, it results in constant party deaths (a.k.a. "wipes" where everyone dies and you spend 15 minutes getting back to where you were), or flaring tempers, trampled egos, or fights over a piece of loot that will be replaced two weeks later. So either you learn how to work within a dysfunctional group and still get things accomplished, or else you spend your days soloing.
Some of the things that can be learned:
- How to lead, without being bossy or overbearing
- Picking up on other people's motives (good or bad)
- Adjusting for a different style
- Working together
- Dealing with disappointment without freaking out
- Interacting with complete strangers
I'd like something that was point to point without a server in the middle. The messages are encrypted so ISPs can't peak in and all logging is left up to the parties involved in the conversation.
Unfortunately, secure key exchange between random parties is a very difficult problem to solve.
However, Jabber/XMPP streams can be encrypted with TLS/SSL, so all of your traffic between you and your server (and between servers) can be encrypted.
Most raw materials are worth more than anything you can craft out of them.
The reason for this is that there are high-level items (Primal Mooncloth, etc) that a crafter can create for themselves. A lot of people wait until 60-70 to start working on their crafting skills in order to create those items. Which means that at low levels, you're competing against level 70s on the Auction House for materials. Since a L70 has a *lot* more gold then you do and can make it a lot easier and a lot faster, guess who ends up setting the Auction House price?
(Which is basically that, as a low level crafter, you're not the customer demographic that the sellers of raw materials are competing for. They're going to sell to whoever is willing to pay them the highest price.)
Low-level items are either useless and impossible to sell, or--if useful--people with high level alts have priced them at a range no new-user can ever afford.
There's almost no such thing as a useless item (greens/blues/purples) in WoW. Even if it doesn't have optimal stats, wear it! Or sell it, or disenchant it. Stop worrying about having the "best" gear, as long as you have "good enough" gear, you'll do fine until you start hitting the 10/25/40 man raid instances in the end-game.
If you're pissed off about prices on the Auction House - don't buy gear there! Go out, adventure, and see what drops of its own accord. Go look for quests that reward you with gear (75% of them are soloable, the rest are probably being worked on by half a dozen other people who will gladly group up to complete it). In the meantime, take advantage of the outrageous AH prices by selling any good gear that you find there. Take advantage of someone else's greed and net yourself a little coin.
Raw materials + labor should always have greater value than the raw materials alone, for example.
You can hold your breath and wish all you want, but when the creation of an item takes no more effort then putting the items in your bag and hitting "create", it is *never* going to happen. EQ2 tried this approach (you had to "combat" with the crafting system in order to create items of the highest quality and stats) where it would take you an hour to create a stack of food. Sure, it resulted in higher prices for finished crafted goods, but eventually crafters got bored so they changed the system.
And overall, I'd argue that the economy in WoW is mostly working. You obtain loot drop X which you wish to exchange for loot drop Y. If "X" is worth more then "Y" on the AH, you'll have no problems. If "X" is worth less then "Y", you'll need to go obtain additional loot drops in order to afford item "Y".
It's blurry as shit and obnoxious to watch unless you have a newer DVD in there. Older DVDs -- which he has more than a few -- look like ass on there because it won't upconvert them to anything near the 1080 it will do. Newer DVDs, like his copy of Ratatouille looked fine upconverted to 1080.
Which has nothing to do with the age of the DVD or inability to upconvert, but is more an issue that early DVDs were encoded at lower then desirable bitrates. (Okay, some of the early encoders weren't the best either.) But even back in 96/97/98 (?) there were DVDs released as "SuperBit" releases where they trimmed ads and extras off the disk and gave it a higher bitrate.
There also may have been a few DVDs that were encoded as half-frames (360x480 a.k.a. half-D1?) instead of full-frame (720x480).
Tried it for 2-3 years (Gentoo on servers), gave up and have switched to CentOS/RedHat.
I loved Gentoo as a way to learn about Linux on the server. But the project has been seemingly adrift for a while, so we're making the move away from it. That, and it's a bit too fiddly on servers for our tastes. (It seems like it should be a no-brainer for servers, but ultimately it's not quite stable enough.)
Ok, but how cheap can you make your file server and still get good performance out of it?
With modern motherboards (which means PCIe with the SATA ports not running through the old PCI controller), Software RAID is perfectly viable for saturating a 1Gbit NIC. And probably with enough disks, capable of saturating 2 or 3 gigabit NICs.
Basically, take a motherboard like Asus M2N-E (with 6+ SATA plugs), the $75 Athlon64 X2 chip, and 2GB of RAM and you'll have pretty much an overkill system for not a whole lot of cash. Something like the 45W X2s with that motherboard will cost around $225 in a bundle from some place like MWave.
If, under heavy disk / network load, you manage to hit 10% on the CPU meters, I would be surprised.
So basically $225 for the CPU/MB/RAM, $100 for the case and PSU, and as many hard drives as you can manage to cram inside a case. You can go cheaper, but going too cheap is counter-productive (failed PSUs, cases with inadequate ventilation, etc. can shorten component life).
My preference for home servers of the fire-and-forget variety is to do RAID1 across 3 disks. That means RAID'ing all partitions (including the swap partition).
Why 3 disks? Because home setups tend to get looked at maybe once a month, and a lot of folks forget to turn on mdadm array monitoring or to setup the box as a postfix null server so that it can e-mail out reports. With the 3rd disk, you have a much larger window during which to discover a drive failure before you lose everything.
(And if you're going to put 3 disks in, instead of doing 2 plus a hot spare, why not put that disk to work?)
RAID5 may be nice for having more net space, but again, home servers typically are skimpy on backups and the rebuild time for RAID5 is not nice. So keep it simple and go with RAID1, where you can pull data easily off of any of the 2 or 3 disks in the array.
Having a second for fail-over might be wise if it's really important, but if all you're running on a server is NTP then you're probably down to just hardware failure to worry about.
A man with two clocks is never quite sure what time it is.
Either run one server or four-plus servers. With four servers, your clients (who should reference all four servers) can deal with a single server failure (leaving them 3) and still figure out if one of the servers is "insane".
With 2 servers, your clients are going to be hopelessly lost at figuring out which server is serving up "better" time.
Three servers works fine, until one fails, leaving your clients in the 2-server (which is right?) dilemma.
Under GNU/Linux, the local clock may be used to initialize the kernel clock, but those two run independently of each other until shutdown (or manual set). Only then the local clock is set to the kernel time, regardless of what the local clock was doing all the time.
You're confusing your terminology (I think). Local clock in NTP is used to refer to the kernel clock. What you're thinking of is the difference between the hardware (BIOS) clock and the kernel/software clock. Under GNU/Linux, the hardware clock is only referenced at startup with the option to write the software clock time to the hardware clock when you shutdown.
NTP disciplines the local/kernel clock while the system is then running.