Comment on Setting up a server for a research team. What should be in my checklist?
bergetfew@sopuli.xyz 3 days agoSorry if I am unable to provide specific details for the queries. I don’t have answers to most of them myself which is why I was hoping what the safest bet for these situations would be to implement.
Highly likely they would be installing new software
I don’t know much about its use case, although it won’t be too intensive since they probably have a separate machine for heavier work.
Backup storage option wasn’t proposed at all. I’m thinking of proposing to implement one.
I expect between 10-20 users.
User permissions requirements wasn’t discussed as well.
Don’t know about the criticality of data. I could only speculate to be considerable by default.
Highly likely they would be installing new software
This basically means that the system will rot over time and will need to have someone who knows what they’re doing to maintain it. If they don’t know enough to do the initial setup, then I would worry about how quickly it would go awry after you no longer have access. given the number of users and the assumed criticality of the data, I would have a long conversation about what can happen and what their plans are
I personally would not do this. There are so many red flags.
rainwall@piefed.social 2 days ago
Backup is step one, or even step 0, of setting up a server. The amount of frustration and even job loss a backup can prevent is always worth the expense of time/money.
Backup can be setup scripts/config files/automation if the data doesnt matter, but you do need it. Also, even if they say the data doesbt matter, the data almost always matters. It may not now, but it will in 2 years when people use the server for real work and everyone just doesnt even begin to think about a backup until it fails one day and they lose all their grant and thesis data.
bergetfew@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Could you suggest what would be the most appropriate backup solution in this case? I could also ask them to arrange a backup drive or a cloud provider if needed.
rainwall@piefed.social 2 days ago
Depends on what you're doing a bit. Databases? Hypervisors? Just files? If all of the above, its best to use an actual product this. Either foss like borgbackup or Urbackup, or something like Veeam which is a popular pay option.
If its a proxmox hypervisor, they have their own free backup appliance, but you need a second physical server to run it on.
If it's just databases, most have a built in way to take a backup. Just google the name and backup. Make sure it's running automatically and is moved to a separate server on each run.
For files, rsync is a great option.