In between keeping all things computing running at Thayer, we always have several projects in the works. Here’s a quick overview of projects we’re currently working on or planning. In no particular order…
Email and collaboration tools
Dartmouth’s Council on Computing has constituted a task force to determine Dartmouth’s requirements for future email and collaboration tools. Thayer School’s Director of Computing Services is on the task force and seeks your thoughts on the subject.
Hard drive based back up server
We are a “belt and suspenders” computing staff. To [snip...]
On Saturday, December 15, 2007, Thayer Computing Services will be upgrading the physical infrastructure of our ThayerFS file server. This new system will provide larger and more cost-effective storage capacity.
In order to perform this upgrade, ThayerFS will be taken offline and will be unavailable from 8:00am until 2:00pm on December 15th. Our hope is that the upgrade will be completed in less time than this, but it may take the full six hours. Once the system is back online, we will send e-mail to the [snip...]
After performance and feature testing AMANDA and Bacula, we’ve decided to go with AMANDA. The speed that AMANDA was able to backup data over the network was nearly twice that of Bacula (80 MB/s compared to 40 MB/s), and AMANDA was slightly faster pushing data to tape (77 MB/s compared to 63 MB/s). The speed advantages that AMANDA showed within our topology were significant enough to warrant it as our backup program of choice. That being said, within other topologies and with different needs, I [snip...]
An important part of any enterprise level storage system is the backup system. For our new inexpensive storage system, we want to find a piece of backup software that is both inexpensive (preferably free) as well as functional. My search for such a program has led to two main candidates: AMANDA and Bacula. I’ll start with AMANDA as that is where my testing began.
AMANDA approaches backups by using native programs such as postfix, tar, dump, xfsdump, etc within a client/server relationship. The [snip...]
