[rescue] Netra 240 - Backup rsync server?

[Mark Brown]

Brooke Gravitt wrote:
> I find myself with a Netra 240 - anyone's opinion on wether it'd make a
> decent backup server for rsyncing to, or putting sparse images on for
> TimeMachine?  Can the SPARCs take a bog-standard PCI 1394/FireWire card &
> use that for additional dasd?
>   
I did something similar with dreadful results. (YMMV)

I was using an Ultra-2 with mirrored 36gb disks as my web/mail server 
for my domain.  Needing additional storage, I procured a NexStar USB 
enclosure, and wired up a Linksys NSLU2 device with Linux firmware in 
order to serve NFS.  I had /home nfs mounted on the Ultra-2 from the 
NSLU2.  Worked great for about 2 years. (slow like crazy, but it was 
only /home for email and basic storage). Then things went terribly wrong...

Remote filesystems were occasionally unresponsive, NFS timeouts etc. I 
believed it to be a NFS bug, as there wasn't anything interesting in the 
logs on either device. 

Cutting to the chase here - I took a hard drive failure within the 
NexStar enclosure.  I believe that the USB:IDE bridge inside the 
enclosure was not reporting the errors back to the upstream host. (There 
were no errors on the Linux/NSLU2 device). 

This would have been fine if my backup strategy would have been 
better... :-(  I'm not sure if my wife has forgiven me for this one yet.

/M