I managed to get mod_status and mod_info put into place on our MyWeb servers. It was interesting to set up, and I'm glad I got that in there. Mod_status provides a basic view of how busy the server really is at that point in time. And so far, they aren't very busy. Fun stuff.

The Scalar 100 was racked today. I also learned that the other administrator was planning on having all four of the backup servers drive one of the drives in this system. I wish he would have told me that, since that particular setup would have ended up costing us around $12,000 more in hardware and software costs. He was, as they say, not pleased. Now we get to figure out how to drive a centralized backup server with responsibility to back up everything Windows/netware on a single server.

There are some real I/O problems with this. For one, with four drives the SCSI card in question has the potential to take up a good chunk of PCI-bus just on that; 64-bit scsi would be a good idea here. Since all of the backup duties will be remote, we get to cram that stream over the ethernet. The network really would benefit from a gigabit NIC, since we have the potential of four separate streams coming down a 100 megabit NIC we WILL get contention and the higher speed is needed. And since we don't really have a server beefy enough to drive it by itself, we're going to have to live with bottlenecking on the PCI bus.

Oh, this will be fun.