rasch
Apparently someone at Sun agreed with my sentiments about moving to a more closed-source model for MySQL.
While my original comments are self serving, apparently Sun believes that it will make better business sense in the long term to keep these components open-source. Hopefully this is a vote of confidence for the quality of product the open-source model has helped MySQL create.
Personal offsite backups stink. I’ve been using a shared hosting account to try and get my backups up and going, which is usually against the terms of service and likely to be cancelled by them at any point. In looking at other options, there are lots of great articles out there covering this topic so I won’t attempt to rehash them. I have 80GB+ of photos, data, etc that needs to be backed up offsite regularly. I used to do this over the internet to my family’s home across the country, but through irrelevant turn of events that’s no longer possible.
I’ve looked at lots of services to support this:
From what I can tell, the only ones here that include support for the Linux-based server which needs to perform these backups for me are: JungleDisk/S3, and BingoDisk. BingoDisk is somewhat pricy and tops out at my current allocation (their top plan is 100GB). Many of the Windows-supporting services allow “unlimited” storage, which is never unlimited but sounds much better. At the size of my data on S3, I’m looking to pay ~$40/month which is getting pretty pricy and makes the hard-drive swapping a much better prospect.
I’ve also considered putting a wifi-capable device at a neighbors house to get me some offsite but allow a LAN connection. This is similar, but much less cool than EJ’s network
For now, I think I’ll just take an encrypted copy of my data to work.
Update:
And for a serendipitous reference to my last post, BingoDisk seems to have had a 10-day+ outage because there was a bug in their super-duper-mega-expensive-Sun-ZFS-data-array-thingy. Which is a big bit of support for my case that more expensive toys aren’t always better. On the upside, they were very open and honest about what was going on. But, they were down for 10-days, wow.
Thanks to Lenovo for making a Bootable CD image of the BIOS update available for my T60.
You’ve bought a bunch of servers, they’re all setup at a facility, but how are they doing? How do you know whether your application is slow because there are lots of users or because you’ve got a disk going bad, or because your indexes no longer fit into memory? How do you know when Apache has died?
We identify the two separate types of questions above.
First, we need a tool to notify a responsible party when services die, disks get full, databases stop accepting connections, servers load spikes, or switch starts dropping packets. We’ve chosen Nagios to fill this void. Nagios allows us to monitor all of the above on each of our servers through plugins including redundancy. Alerts can be sent to a secondary party if the first neither fixes a problem nor acknowledges it within a certain amount of time. In addition to a highly-flexible set of bundled plugins, it’s easy to add new plugins to monitor custom application services and verify things are in working order.
Second, we need a tool to allow us to see trends in load, memory, disk space, network traffic, database queries, mail queues, and application metrics in graphical format. At the workshop in New York, I was turned on to Ganglia which monitors and graphs metrics just like these using RRDTool (by the author of MRTG). Ganglia monitors clustered systems by using multicast to communicate amoung the servres. We now track trends in our web, database, mail, and supporting servers’ trends in a nice web interface. In addition, I threw together a PHP script to monitor MySQL metrics in a matter of a few hours.
Not only can we get immediate notification (to a pager) when things break, but we can now diagnose more abstract problems like bottlenecks and hardware problems before they become critical.
[tags]monitoring, nagios, ganglia, linux[/tags]
