From Netware 3 to Netware-free

Today was the first day of our “Netware to Samba migration” at work. Staff have been kicked off the network for a few days while we do this: it has been planned for ages, so they’ve had time to organise non-computing work to do, giving seminars to each other, having long lunches etc.

It started well. We got the Netware servers offline and connected up their disks to a spare machine in order to copy their contents off. These files are destined for the server which is to be the Samba server ($SAMBA_SERVER). However, on powering down $SAMBA_SERVER in order to attach our shiny external storage array, something bad must have happened.

The short version of the story is that two of the three hard disks inside $SAMBA_SERVER had failed. This is a RAID-5 array, which means that it can cope with one drive failure, but not two; thus the disk system is unreadable. I said a few Very Bad Words, obviously. As a result, we need to replace the disks and rebuild the whole server. We have backups, naturally, which ought to give us 100% of the user files back and 99% of the setup/configuration required. A major pain in the proverbial, though, of course. Fingers crossed that the backups are OK.

During the course of the above, I actually swapped in a different RAID controller, an Adaptec 2230SLP which is a pretty serious 64-bit dual-channel Ultra-SCSI 320 thing. We bought this as a contingency measure a while back and now seems as good a time as any to use it: at least we have a few spare fast SCSI disks too. I like the RAID BIOS for this card. It’s completely minimal which is exactly what you want with this sort of device: “View Arrays”, “Make New Arrays”, “Assign Spare Disks” is about all it does: no need for anything else.

Tomorrow, I’ll install a fresh Debian Sarge AMD64 from scratch on this quad-Opteron system. And then restore stuff from backups. Fingers crossed, yeah?

Today I was wearing the most appropriate T-shirt: “Don’t blame me, it’s a hardware problem.” Seems like I tempted fate. Unfortunately, I do not possess a “Hey, great, it’s all just working fine again today” T-shirt.

Oh, and the wrist is better now, too. Seems to be fully recovered 🙂