[nylug-talk] Slim home server for samba and subversion ( and possibly IMAP)

[Chris Knadle]

> On Mon, 2008-05-12 at 22:03 -0400, Chris Knadle wrote:


On Wednesday 14 May 2008, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> Heck, just having exposure to legacy BOOTP/TFTP made me an instant
> expert in only more recent, automated Enterprise Linux and Windows
> deployments.  I still have trouble explaining that to potential clients
> who want Windows knowledge as well, although at least a good number of
> Linux folk are also long-time UNIX wennies.

   I've installed several *NIX OS's via BOOTP/TFTP including PXE, but I'm not 
sure what you mean by "legacy" BOOTP/TFTP, and I've never attempted to load 
Windows via BOOTP.  Just... somehow never came up.

> > Yeah, I happen to like setting auto spin-down after 15 mins
> > using 'hdaparm -S 180 <device>' at bootup for drives that are only used
> > occasionally.  I honestly don't know if it helps drive longevity or not.
>
> Actually, you may _not_ want to do that with 3.5" disc.  You usually
> want to spin it up only _once_ per day, and then spin it down at the end
> of the day.  And you really don't want to use it more than 8 hours, 14
> at the most.  But don't spin it down every 15 minutes, at least not with
> commodity 3.5" disc.

   Well, again, I use the above settings for drives that are 
only /occasionally/ used.  Setting the drive to spin down after 15 mins of 
inactivity is pointless on the drive that contains the root (i.e. /) 
filesystem; it seems to always get some periodic activity and in my 
experience never spins down.
   The reason I bother to do this is that I have several drives in internal 
enclosures in desktop boxes that are used for backup purposes, so the only 
time they're used is during the backup.  Thus most of the time the drive 
spins up in the morning, is never even mounted, spins down after 15 minutes, 
and is never spun up again for the rest of the day.  If and when a backup is 
done the drive automatically spins up again when it's used, and spins down 
when it's done.
   I agree with you that for a drive that's sporatically used throughout the 
day setting it to spin down after 15 minutes is a bad idea, since it will 
pointlessly end up having the drive spin up + down again lots of times every 
day.  But in my particular use case I think what I'm doing is fine.  However 
as I mentioned, I don't know if it actually helps increase drive longevity or 
not.  My understanding is that the main reason this is done for laptops isn't 
for drive longevity but rather for power savings, and being too aggressive in 
spinning down the disk is detrimental for the drive.

   When it comes to drives only being used 8 - 14 hours / day, well, I don't 
disagree, but I think there's just not much to be done about it.  Obviously 
I'm not going to try to power down my remote servers for half of every day 
just so that the drives can be spun down.  ;-)  So as far as I'm concerned 
the length of time per day that I use a disk is arbitrary, and I'm just not 
going to worry about it -- it is whatever it is.  I'm likewise probably not 
going avoid working on my laptop just because my "allocated" disk usage time 
for the day is up.  :-P

   -- Chris

-- 

Chris Knadle
Chris.Knadle at coredump.us