frankenbox to "real" server?

[pete]

At what point do you realise "Actually, perhaps we shouldn't run so many Really Quite Important Things on random hardware from the junkpile?"

 

I have a frankenserver which provides (and holds) a fair amount of valuable info (network and server monitoring, documentation, web apps). I was planning to transfer it into a rack case when I upgrade the distro and wondered whether I should move it to slightly more robust hardware.

 

I realise that with a linux box you can pretty much stuff whatever you want in there and it will run happily (albeit perhaps slowly). The box has created no problems for nearly 2 1/2 yrs *touches wood*, except lagging a bit on large mysql queries.

[Geoff]

With older hardware you certainly have a valid concern about reliablity, espcially if it's little more than desktop grade hardware to start with.

 

From a purely technical point of view, there's likely no RAID of any kind and upgrading the hardware (more memory or a faster CPU for example) to cope with future demand will prove troublesome/impossible.

 

Also, boxes thrown together like this tend not to have the secondary systems typical of most servers. Robust backup and recovery systems for example or even something as simple as a UPS.

 

Bottom line, I think it's fine for prototyping an idea and proving something is possible to do. But once a system is under real use you need it running on real hardware. Especially if it's holding valuable data.

[pete]

@Geoff,

Cheers, I'm running this past the hive mind to ensure I haven't got server fever after getting another rack.

 

(it uses mirrored disks, sits on a ups and gets backed up nightly, but it is reasonably old desktop hardware that I found in a cupboard.)

 

IIRC you've got a slew of monitoring kit deployed, mind telling me what you're running it on?

[Geoff]

Dell Poweredge thing. Low end P4 Celeron but it is a server (one of the 'workgroup' models if I recall).