Would this be a good configuration for a Nodeworx/Siteworx based server or would 2 independent disks be better?
Let me explain a bit the constraints of the system so the logic behind our decisions can be better understood.
The main “problem” we had to tackle when designing the system is how to most easily and efficiently enforce system quotas. We use the default linux kernel quota system to enforce disk quotas. Using this system works well but there is one key constraint that makes things work. The constraint is that all user-touchable files must be on the same partition. That is all web files, all email accounts / emails and all databases / database contents must reside on the same partition to accturately account for and enforce disk quotas on a per user basis. This allows us to provide 1 quota for a given SiteWorx account instead of having differing quotas for each service (web, mail, databases etc).
That said, we do allow even more granular quotas in the email portion of SiteWorx where you can limit a given email account to X MB. But this is still umbrella’d by the main SiteWorx disk quota.
Now to your question Robert 
You can use 2 disks in a RAID config without any problems at all. Doing so will still give InterWorx-CP the partition setup needed to enforce quotas. Actually using 2 disks without RAID could actually break quotas depending on how you set things up. For instance, if you put / on the main disk and then /var on the secondary you’d lose all quota checking for /var, which is where all mysql data lives. Now, this may not be a concern, in which case you can ignore the quota issue and InterWorx-CP will function happily, but will mis-report the DB quotas.
Regarding backing up your server(s).
All InterWorx-CP internal data is stored in a MySQL database and some other ancillary files and you can back up the internal InterWorx-CP database just as you would any other MySQL DB using mysqldump, mysqlhotcopy or even via phpMyAdmin etc. The user is always ‘iworx’ and the password can be found in your /home/interworx/iworx.ini file under the [iworx] group and the dsn= entry.
You’ll have to parse out the password visually as the DSN is a combined string of all auth info. For example if your DSN looked like this:
dsn="mysql://iworx:zQ13afS32aC@unix(/home/interworx/var/run/mysql.sock)/iworx"
Then your password is: zQ13afS32aC
You can then dump the InterWorx-CP internal DB by going to: https://<your server>:2443/mysql/ and choosing the 2nd ‘localhost’ from the drop down. Then just enter user: iworx and pass: zQ13afS32aC in this example and you can then use the ‘Export’ feature of phpMyAdmin to dump each DB. Again, you can use any other mysql backup feature as well but there is one thing you should take into account. If you’re going to use mysqlhotcopy or mysqldump you’ll have to use the ‘–defaults-file=/home/interworx/etc/my.cnf’ directive so that the 2 command line tools know to use the special socket for the InterWorx-CP instance of MySQL.
Hope this helps :).
Chris
