Mission Critical Implementations
All servers, with exception to the development server(s) used by the WEB/GUI designers, will be using a stable and patched FreeBSD operating system. The decision to use FreeBSD as the operating system of choice was influenced by ease of use, driver support, security, linux compatibility and the ability to manipulate the tcp/ip stack to allow for optimal data transfers. Of course other factors played a part in choosing FreeBSD as our operating system of choice.
Implementing a naming convention for all servers that will be used to host data for the Stackfile Corp. will need to be done ASAP.
Load Balancing will be a big part in keeping the traffic stable and steady. A Foundry load balancer would be ideal. If we can not obtain a Foundry Load Balancer a more likely solution could be round-robin dns with a central rsync server for file distribution. This should only be a temporary solution that would eventually lead to moving towards the Foundry Load Balancer.
To ensure optimal data transfer it is imperitive that all network cards be of highest quality. If possible device polling should be enabled for the network cards (only on non-SMP servers). Additionally, the 100baseTX with full-duplex mediaopts should be set if possible. Syntaxing for such network optimizations would take place in /etc/rc.conf with a variable similar to: ifconfig_bge0="inet ipaddress netmask yournetmask media 100baseTX mediaopt full-duplex". Of course bge0 is a broadcom card, it is not guaranteed that all servers will contain this network card.
Although it may be vain to say, I will probably need to be allocated a mobile computing solution. My current setup consists of an Intel(c) Celeron 600mhz cpu with approximately 192mb of SDRAM with Windows(c) XP Proffessional w/SP2 as my main operating system. As one could assertain my computer is definately not up to par to do the multitasking that will be required to admin multiple machines.