Linux, gobs of RAM, RAID and performance suckage...

[Paul Lussier]

Neil Joseph Schelly <neil at jenandneil.com> writes:

> I'm not sure the topology of your SAN,

It's not a SAN.  It's direct-attached storage.

> but can you connect another machine to the SAN with read-only access
> to those filesystems to do backups without involving the NFS server
> at all?  -N

In theory, yes, in practicality, no.  Also, the backups are not
"touching the NFS server". 

Cast of characters:
  Playing the part of:    Actor:
    the NFS server         space-monster
    the backup server      amanda

Amanda connects to the amanda daemon on space-monster (via inetd) and
requests that he start his backup process.  space-monster in turn
kicks off a gtar process which sends the data back to amanda.  The
gtar process is reading the local disk, not NFS.  Apparently, this
local disk I/O request supercedes NFS disk requests.  But there's much
more than that happening here.  CPU utilization is through the roof on
space-monster.  That wasn't the case yesterday before the memory
upgrade.

-- 
Seeya,
Paul
--
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