embo writes: "The company I work for has been approached recently by an academic organization looking for advice on providing web space for 30,000 - 40,000 users. They are limited by budget, so I'd like to recommend something with Linux and apache. They are thinking of offering around 50 MB if disk space per user (which at maximum utilization would be ~2 TB of data storage), and no database driven content (though they want to allow CGI through Perl and Python, for example)." This is a huge undertaking. Can anyone think of solutions better than the ones embo outlines below?

TOTKChief writes "NASA Watch reported on this the other day, but now the Huntsville Times has dug into the firing of a NASA contractor charged with radiation safety at Marshall Space Flight Center. NASA is so serious about safety and redundancy that they're sending two probes nearly simultaneously to Mars, but it's apparent here that they don't give a rip about the safety of their employees."

benzilla asks: "I'm using a digital camera to take aerial photos from a helicopter. Flash cards for this camera are too expensive and keep breaking apparently. An idea would be to take a raid up in the 'copter and write the images directly to this (due to the cost of the flights the requirement is to be able to store as many images (4-8mb each) as possible on the raid each flight, as well as using redundancy to ensure that the picture is saved. This raid would then be read via the office network (Windows unfortunately). I don't really want to send a PC up with the kit as what I really want is just a simple box that would use the raid as a massive flash card. (just to note here all vibration issues etc. have already been solved). Is there such hardware available? Camera is a top range Kodak, with PCMCIA (Type III?) and SCSI ports for connection." Don't panic! This isn't being used for spy purposes. Honestly!

A few weeks ago, you asked questions of Ryan Lackey, CTO for HavenCo, a company dedicated to providing secure off-shore data hosting from Sealand, a principality off the coast of England. Ryan has lately survived dental emergencies, the loss of a laptop (it dropped into the North Sea -- how many people can say that?) and other stresses, but he's followed through with some interesting answers. He even has some ideas for how you can make a lot of money, and lists the tools you need to start your own data haven. Kudos to Ryan for taking the time to answer so thoroughly.

Cheeze asks: "I was wondering if there are any working implementations of RAID2 over TCP/IP. This would be a logical solution to high availability and data redundancy. The ability to have two identical mirrored separate machines with identical data stored on them would almost remove the risk of a hardware failure. I haven't heard or seen any documentation on this, but it should be relatively easily. On a high bandwidth (>=100Mbps) private switched network, there should be no problem with keeping the bandwidth up to par with the hard drive transfer speeds. a software solution would be practical, but a hardware solution would be optimal. Any ideas or possible future projects on this topic?" Is such a thing practicle, or even possible?

austad asks: "At my company, we run a fairly large Web site. It's distributed on multiple servers in three geographic locations. In each of these locations, we have several Real Video servers which all serve the same content for redundancy, and load balancing. We have a central FTP server in one geographic location that files get uploaded to, and then replicated out to the Real Video servers. The problem with this model is that there is a single point of failure. We would like to put an identical FTP server in each location, and when a producer wants to upload a file, they are randomly directed to an active FTP server (we use a distributed DNS system that will direct users to machines that are marked as "up"), and they upload the file." (Continued in body...)

HD 456 wrote to us with an MSNBC story about the new observatories that are starting to come online for the purpose of gravity wave research. One is located outside New Orleans, the other in Washington State, the facilities will shoot lasers down 2.5 mile tunnels in an attempt to detect changes in gravity caused by black holes. Redundancy in facilities is being used to avoid having false background noise skew results. In addition to garnering more information on black holes, the scientists also hope to collect data concering the origin of matter.

Great answers to this week's interview questions. Mick Morgan, of the UK's CCTA [Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency] has turned this Q&A session into a truly detailed primer on how to choose the hardware and operating system behind a high-profile Web site - and has dispelled quite a few myths in the process. You'll want to read this interview even if you're not into server mechanics. It contains enough personal insight and wit to be of interest even to Slashdot's least-technical readers. (Click below to see what we mean!)

Ledge Kindred asks: "I am looking for a distributed filesystem to run on my Linux boxes at home. I have several and most of the "extra" space on each one is "going to waste" - I'd like to be able to combine it all into a single network-able filesystem. How?" Click below for more.

Monday we asked you to post questions for Alan Cox. We got so many good ones that only those moderated up to five were sent to him! Alan's answers are as great as you'd expect from one of the world's greatest kernel hackers. Read the full Q&A session below.

So without a doubt, the best time for the power supply in your server to die is when you're out of town. Oh, and the line to your boxes at home should die too. And the only machine with a working modem in your hotel room should be an NT box (without ssh installed) and then the connection you dial through should be 19 hops away from anything (routing from San Jose to NY, DC, Boston, and back to Frisco and conveniently losing almost all of the packets) Anyway, we're back up and kinda hobbling now, (thanks to Jesse & Dan and UP Networks for being jonny's-on-the-spot) but I'm trying to fix some stuff as fast as I can. In the meantime, things are gonna be a bit zany, so don't flame me to loud. And don't worry, we've been working for the last month to build a new system with redundancy and stuff so that this won't happen again (knock on wood).

Andy McCoy wrote in with this doosy! He asks: "Of the network filesystem implementations out there (NFS, AFS, Coda, SMB, NCP are the ones I'm aware of), is there any way to set up a pseudo-RAID network filesystem. I realize it would not be RAID per se, but a filesystem that a) would be distributed across multiple disks, and appear as 1 filesystem, b) would provide redundency between the servers (eg - 1 goes down, one or more of the other servers has a copy of that information, and is still available), and c) is efficient about bandwidth concerns?" Click below for more.

It's all fun and games out here at ALS, hopefully I can sit down now and actually get the summary out before either netscape crashes again, or something else occurs that forces me to leave the safe haven that is the Slash/Themes/Meat booth. Hit the link and read the deal...