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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n During the course of the above, I actually swapped in a different RAID controller, an Adaptec 2230SLP<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Oh, and the wrist is better now, too. Seems to be fully recovered \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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… (read more<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}