Re: Inherited FreeBSD machine without: firewall, proxy (i.e. squid) and RAID management

* On 22/08/06 08:56 +0200, Jeremiah Foster wrote:
| Good morning list,
|
| The company I work for has brought some web serving in-house. We now
| have a machine from a subcontractor that is running FreeBSD 4.11. It is
| a production web server responsible for generating data from the
| database and presenting it (in Zope, yuck.)
|
| I would like to create a firewall

Use IPFilter for the firewall. The rules are kinda easy to understand.

| add caching so that the web pages get served more quickly,

Use Squid with reverse proxy configuration, but here again, you have to
read the Squid FAQ about RAM requirements and cache optimization in

| and find out when the RAID disks are failing, right now I can tell
| when that happens because the database slows to a crawl.

That reasoning does not sound technical at all. Please find out why
the MySQL server itself is slowing down by using tools like mytop (in
the ports, log-slow-queries, etc).
If you have RAID, please don't say it is RAID 5 with less than 6 disks!
That config sux, If you have less than six disks, just use disk
mirroring (RAID 1+0).


| Does anyone have any advice?

;)

| I am aware of excellent FreeBSD firewalling software which I will most
| likely use.

Okay...

| I am also familiar with squid - is this my best be for caching web pages
| so that the site appears to load faster?

I'd say no and yes. Tell us the machine's specs and how it is
configured. BTW, could you please ask that contractor to give you a
system running FreeBSD 6.1, or at worst 5.5? You'd be happy with ufs2,
disk snapshots, etc..


| I can see from dmesg.boot that the relevant RAID aparatus is a <COMPAQ RAID 1
| VOLUME inte> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-0 device, what would be the right
| software to monitor this volume?

oh, RAID 1 is not that bad performance-wise. About monitoring, I am not
sure it's the RAID you want to deal with at present, but rather the big
picture - why certain services are slowing down... It could be Zope!

| Obviously not vinum since I have been informed that it is a software
| RAID management system, not hardware management.

I'd say you are too mixed up at the moment about what advise you are
looking for.

Please be straight, present the whole scenario and let us think about it
and give advise.


-Wash

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