The Server Room

As we do not earn money for the first couple of months, we have to be sparse with spending money for gadgets. That also means, we have only bought two old Dell PowerEdge 2650 servers with hardware RAID-5 and three SCSI harddisks each. The first step was to setup the two servers with Fedora Core 11 (FC11). We don't want to explain why we took FC11; we just did it. First problem: hardware RAID-5 is extremely slow. Let me make this clear: RAID-5 is extremely slow. After fiddling around with a lot of raid controller configurations; we gave software RAID-5 a try (you can setup software RAID-5 while installing FC11). Result: even slower. After a long discussion, we decided to try the following scenario:
We use one server with four hard disks and software RAID-1 (also via FC11 installation). We connected two disks at a time to a RAID-1 composite. The first is occupied with the partitions /boot and /; the second /home and /opt. To setup the RAID-1 composites we used the "Configuring Software RAID1 on Fedora Core using Disk Druid during system install" tutorial of Adam Ben-Gur.

The second server is used as spare in case we have to make a disaster recovery. How we prepare ourselves for a disaster recovery, we'll explain later.

The server now runs relatively fast. So, we can begin with installing the necessary tools for our project. Must haves: Wiki, task management, version control, continuous integration, issue tracking.

We decided to use:

• Webserver: Apache httpd 2.2.x (latest version found via yum)
• Wiki, task management, issue tracking: Redmine 0.8.x (download online)
• Version control: Subversion 1.6.x (latest version found via yum)
• Continuous integration server: Hudson 1.3xx (download online)
  

Don't worry, we didn't forget about the backup setup for disaster recovery. We'll write about them later; when we have a running system to test backup restore and disaster recovery scenarios.

After a few beers...

... we, a five-brain team, joined and founded the company ambitz. Our primary goals are to realize a custom-made internet platform and to have a lot of fun. ambitz stands for an ambitious team -- a team that is led by passion, a team that is dedicated to an idea.

On a regularly basis we're going to write blogs about our work in progress. We will explain how we produce a valuable product with a low budget; provide insights into our infrastructure; describe what technical tool-set we use to accomplish our goal; illustrate how we solved the various technical problems we encounter (and already have encountered); let you take part in the joy of having an outstanding team; and show how we are spoiled by our personal chef.

So stay tuned and watch out!