Juggling bits
Nov. 24th, 2012 09:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
johnridleySo, here is a synopsis of the last few days:
Lost two drives in a RAID array, losing all the data. The drives actually didn't fail, Linux was just overly nervous and preemptively failed them. Subsequent testing shows that there was no actual problem with the drives. The data was probably recoverable but I don't know enough about mdadm and I decided that the loss of the data was less irritating than trying to learn mdadm.
K's old laptop backed up, a new install of Win7 installed, had to call MS to re-activate it. Handed it off to T. During the backup I tried CloneZilla including doing a restore from the backup. It worked fine. I had also used True Image as a backup to the backup, but CZ seems fine.
Since the Linux box was running on a dual core Atom with 2GB of RAM, moving it to Windows wasn't viable, so I decided to move to the lab PC. The lab PC is a decent Dell AMD 64, I think 2.4 GHz dual core with 4GB of RAM from about 5 years ago. The case would only hold 2 hard drives so that had to go. I moved the mainboard and boot drive (Windows 7) into the old Linux box's case (an Antec choosen for its big stack of drive bays). I installed a brand new Thermaltake power supply just on the off chance that a PS issue caused the drive failures (the Dell power supply was less watts).
I was going to use the 4 port PCI SATA controller's built in (software) RAID 5 implementation, but with 4x 1.5T drives it insisted on creating two 2.2T partitions that were not editable. So I gave up, put it in JBOD mode and used Windows 7 to span 4 drives to 6T. I kept the 5th drive out as a cold spare (or more likely, backup)
I had a hell of a time because some configurations refused to boot, and it didn't seem to follow a pattern. After several hours of mucking around I determined that it wasn't the configuration causing the problems, it was a bad SATA cable. Feh.
I spent a couple of days copying data from USB backup drives back to the array. About 4T of the 6T space is now full again.
I thought I'd lost my ebooks folder, which would have been a bit of a pain, but I found I had TWO recent backups. Ditto my audiobooks folder but there was only one backup of that.
I've been really tearing up my usenet quota replacing some stuff. I did have nearly 2TB of quota built up over the last few years though.
The current version of TightVNC works quite well. I hadn't used it in a while.
I'm actually happy to have a Windows box as my primary NAS/utility box. I find it just vastly easier to work with. I can get along with Linux but it just doesn't seem natural to me, even after 15 years of using it professionally 8+ hours a day. Besides that, I'm happy to just click on an MSI/EXE and have the software just install and run rather than the mess I'm used to with Linux. And having an accessible machine to plug backup drives into rather than having to do it over the network is very nice.
While doing all this, I've been trying to clean up a bit. I can actually walk across the lab now, and I've finally gotten all of my junk out of in front of Jenn's junk, so she can get to and sort that stuff now.
So yeah, it's been an interesting Thanksgiving. It's Saturday and I'm back at work.
Lost two drives in a RAID array, losing all the data. The drives actually didn't fail, Linux was just overly nervous and preemptively failed them. Subsequent testing shows that there was no actual problem with the drives. The data was probably recoverable but I don't know enough about mdadm and I decided that the loss of the data was less irritating than trying to learn mdadm.
K's old laptop backed up, a new install of Win7 installed, had to call MS to re-activate it. Handed it off to T. During the backup I tried CloneZilla including doing a restore from the backup. It worked fine. I had also used True Image as a backup to the backup, but CZ seems fine.
Since the Linux box was running on a dual core Atom with 2GB of RAM, moving it to Windows wasn't viable, so I decided to move to the lab PC. The lab PC is a decent Dell AMD 64, I think 2.4 GHz dual core with 4GB of RAM from about 5 years ago. The case would only hold 2 hard drives so that had to go. I moved the mainboard and boot drive (Windows 7) into the old Linux box's case (an Antec choosen for its big stack of drive bays). I installed a brand new Thermaltake power supply just on the off chance that a PS issue caused the drive failures (the Dell power supply was less watts).
I was going to use the 4 port PCI SATA controller's built in (software) RAID 5 implementation, but with 4x 1.5T drives it insisted on creating two 2.2T partitions that were not editable. So I gave up, put it in JBOD mode and used Windows 7 to span 4 drives to 6T. I kept the 5th drive out as a cold spare (or more likely, backup)
I had a hell of a time because some configurations refused to boot, and it didn't seem to follow a pattern. After several hours of mucking around I determined that it wasn't the configuration causing the problems, it was a bad SATA cable. Feh.
I spent a couple of days copying data from USB backup drives back to the array. About 4T of the 6T space is now full again.
I thought I'd lost my ebooks folder, which would have been a bit of a pain, but I found I had TWO recent backups. Ditto my audiobooks folder but there was only one backup of that.
I've been really tearing up my usenet quota replacing some stuff. I did have nearly 2TB of quota built up over the last few years though.
The current version of TightVNC works quite well. I hadn't used it in a while.
I'm actually happy to have a Windows box as my primary NAS/utility box. I find it just vastly easier to work with. I can get along with Linux but it just doesn't seem natural to me, even after 15 years of using it professionally 8+ hours a day. Besides that, I'm happy to just click on an MSI/EXE and have the software just install and run rather than the mess I'm used to with Linux. And having an accessible machine to plug backup drives into rather than having to do it over the network is very nice.
While doing all this, I've been trying to clean up a bit. I can actually walk across the lab now, and I've finally gotten all of my junk out of in front of Jenn's junk, so she can get to and sort that stuff now.
So yeah, it's been an interesting Thanksgiving. It's Saturday and I'm back at work.
