Naming a new Storage Server?

 Server names?  In practice I've always been in places or projects where folks are bad at naming things and I am as guilty as the next person in that realm.  I've been on projects naming releases for obscure lord of the rings characters, for characters in a random fantasy story the lead developer had written, for birds, biomes, planets and stars.... Generally these are very niche, if you know the reference you're fine, and it brings a little character to your server.

The trouble arises when a name becomes attached to the history of that thing, the worst I never had was a project with a release named Elrond, where the release itself was re-released, so we ended up with Elrond-2, 3 and 4, then Elrond4RC1 for an update to that successful update, it was just a minefield.

In servers, the worst I ever managed was a box called "Diomede", which would often fail because of bad (read that as cheap) hardware, so the name became inextricably linked to bad performance and issues, despite being a really nice Tomcat & IBM Websphere host with a near 99% up-rate, but that 1% let it down because EVERYONE worked on that one box.

At home at the moment I have:

* Wellington

* Napoleon

* Elba

* Ney

* Waterloo

I'm sure you can tell the reference, but I've had about three versions of "Waterloo", I've also had two versions of "Ney" and at least five "Napoleons".  The names are getting mixed up, as I leave a home project and come back I'll go look up my notes, pull up that machine storage only to realise "oh this was on the OLD version of that name" which was long whisked away into the ethereal world of my replication server or just lost to time.

As such, I want to have ONE big disk server, and I really want to make it nice and neat.   I've already retired all my older machines, like this one:

But I do now have TWO cases of this specification, with the many internal drive bays:

In one of these I have a low-power Core i3 T class CPU, I forget the exact spec, but it's a low-power chip (35W) just enough power to run storage backups IMO, so this is where I'm going to start my quest.

Spinning rust drives are the challenge, I have four 4TB drives just sat idle, plus a host of smaller 1TB drives lying around, these need sorting out, mounting, checking and I then need a strategy.

I'm very likely to go with ZFS creating a mirror across three 1TB for critical storage and then some striped storage across the 4TB drives.  I then want this to make files available across the network, both to my 10GBit and my 1Gbit LAN's.... That's going to require a bit of work to install the former, but the latter should be available out of the box.

This starts to completely retire my 4Gbit fiber channel interconnects too.

So what to name this first stepping stone?.... Comments below:

Elba

Helena

Since it's about storage, I think my theme of names points to one of the islands which hosted Napoleon in exile... but lets see what you guys come up with.

What's Going On?

Well, we're moving house again!.... Yes, this has been a bit mad, there's a lot going on and logistics are in place, but I'm going to be getting my own little office room back again rather than having to split creative thinking with a bedroom/high traffic area.

There's no real reason for this beyond this house didn't suit us for our living needs of space and specification, sure it's very close to our horses but it's not the house for us.

We've made a modest profit on what we've paid for it, with the rise in the market happening all around, but that's been offset by our paying more for a target property than it is really worth, and it itself being inflated in price by the market.

But whatever, a move... so that's where I've been, as well as being very very busy with work.

I am also working 100% at home now, so I've found that break between wanting to program in my own time somewhat removed by being at home all day working at programming, and of course I can't talk at all about my work on these pages; one day maybe.

Today though, a head of the move, I've been thinking about my network set up, at the moment my network is rather broken up, some of my machines are already at the new house, some are in storage with the in-laws and others are here sat with me, but without power.  I have though received some nice kit from my employer to work from home... New screens and a lovely spec PC are the big ticket items, but generally I'm just in a holding pattern until we move.

Here however is my planned network...

We will go over this in a follow up post towards the weekend.  And I'm going to be changing things up a bit, I want to support PXE booting several things, replacing some of my servers/services with VM's on the lower-power machines I have.  And then only waking up the high power machines when serious work is required, and all that waking and sleeping going on automatically through scripts & network magic packets.... Lets see where this evolution goes.