Creating a Rack

If you have a plethora of equipment lying around, you can make your own Truxton Forensic Rack solution. This article will discuss how to configure the rack as a Truxton solution.

Equipment

The number and type of equipment that make up the rack is up to you. All Truxton needs is Windows OS.

Storage

Truxton ETL servers require a single view of depot storage. When an ETL process writes to a depot file, a process on a different machine must be able to read from it. ETL's require fast IO. For this reason we leave this to the operating system. One possible solution is to use Windows Storage Spaces Direct. The remainder of this article will assume that all rack servers will have the mount point for the shares file system to be C:\ClusterStorage.

Each server will have a rather small C: drive which will host the operating system and applications. They will also contain a larger D:\ drive to hold logs file, sets, and temporary files. Ideally these will SSDs.

Sample Rack

Let's assume you have three servers lying around. You might populate the rack thusly:

U18	Network Switch
U17	KVM
U13	Server 3
U09	Server 2
U05	Server 1
U01	UPS

Responsibilities

Decide which machines will have which responsibilities. There are a handful of singleton pieces of Truxton:

1. Database
2. Message Bus
3. Load Status Monitor

These do not need to be hosted on every server.

Configurations

You may want to play with different configurations of Truxton on the rack. To reconfigure Truxton, you just stop Truxton, replace the TruxtonSettings.xml file, replace the TruxtonService.xml file, and restart Truxton. You can make this process easier by using scripts and a configuration library.

Scripts

In the root of D:\, place batch files that will reconfigure that specific server by stopping the services, replacing the configuration files and restarting.

Configuration Library

In C:\Cluster