Re: CVS over NFS

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Monday, May 6, 2002 at 17:21:10 (-0700), Shatzer, Larry wrote: ]
> Subject: CVS over NFS
>
> What I am faced with is rolling CVS out to our mid sized company, and we are
> faced with disk space issues, and have a fairly large NAS, that will have
> space allocated for CVS repositories. What I want to do is have the main
> development server running CVS, which has the CVS repository mounted via
> NFS.

Disk is cheap.  Buy some more.  Seriously.

You could buy three or six 30-120GB modern high-speed ATA UltraDMA
drives as your repository size requires, an equal number of ATA
controllers (one disk per totally independent channel, please), and the
necessary server system to put it all together, and install something
like NetBSD with RAIDframe to give yourself full RAID-5 protected disk
space for all but the boot disk, and still end up spending very little
for what you're getting.  With RAIDframe you can even run with a fully
hot spare, auto rebuild and all.  If that's not good enough or fast
enough for you then 

If backups are your issue then mirror the whole works over to your
corporate NAS/SAN server as regularly as necessary and reasonable using
rsync and let them back it up for you.

Even just in terms of throughput though, unless you're going to put a
dedicated gigabit (or maybe FDDI) connection between the NAS/SAN server
then you're going to create your tightest bottleneck right around the
resource CVS needs most:  filesystem I/O!

Whether or not CVS will be "safe" to run over NFS to any given NAS
server is very difficult to say.  There are many variables and an even
greater number of potential problems to weigh and analyse.

-- 
                                                                Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <address@hidden>;  <address@hidden>;  <address@hidden>
Planix, Inc. <address@hidden>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <address@hidden>