*DONE* Planned Forums Outage 1/17/05 Options

[Imhotep]

There will be an extended forums outage starting 07:00 EST (12:00 GMT) on Wednesday, Jan 12, 2005 to pre-emptively replace a hard drive that the system has identified as starting to fail.

The shutdown, installation of the new disks, transfer of data to the new drive, and completion of post-installation diagnostics and performance checking is anticipated to take less than four hours.

Apologies in advance for any inconvenience this may cause.

I

POST NOTE: We are looking to upgrade the Mirror HD on Monday....

[Guest__*]

Dear Peter,

Boy you are lucky that I will be out working all that time ....

Otherwise youwould have an addict chasing after you.

Love
Alan

[Guest_Jox_*]

Peter, Thanks again...

Sounds like a busy breakfast for you.

Good luck; hope it isn't too frustrating.

James.

[Cleo_Serapis]

Please spread the word...

Not eveyone reads this part of our forum board....

[Guest_Perrorist_*]

That translates as 11:00 pm local time for me. I shall be asleep (I hope).  :)

[Cleo_Serapis]

I'll send a mass PM to members in a few as follows:

Hello all MM members!  

Yes - our HAL 9000+1 computer has alerted us (as some may recall from last week) that one of our 'mass storage devices' (hard drives) will fail within 72 hours.  

It is expected to function correctly until it fails.

So, we're gonna do an EVA (go into the basement) and replace it {tomorrow} starting at 07:00 EST (12:00 GMT) on Wednesday, Jan 12, 2005.

The shutdown, installation of the new disks, transfer of data to the new drive, and completion of post-installation diagnostics and performance checking is anticipated to take less than four hours.

During this time, you may have access to the forums but caution that you should save to wordpad anything you may post as there is no telling when HAL will initiate the dreaded "Page Cannot be Displayed". It will be on and off as the work is done.

When the mission is completed, Imhotep will post a reply in this thread.  

Apologies in advance for any inconvenience this may cause.

Why not check out our home page at http://www.mosaicmusings.net and into the forums & fun area? Try some random generators perhaps OR magnet poetry for you? How about a nice game of chess (wrong movie)?

Anyway, ttfn.

Cleo and Imhotep    

[Guest_Toumai_*]

Thanks, Cleo and Imhotep.

Hope all goes smoothly and look forward to seeing it all back up and running with the minimum of hassle.

Fran

[Imhotep]

There are a couple of things that I can take care of before shutting down the system completely.  I'll be leaving the board up until approx 7:30-7:45 (12:30-12:45GMT).  Any activity posted before the shutdown will be preserved when the site returns.

See ya on the flip side,
I

[Imhotep]

Greetings,

I've moved the system to a new hard disk so the data is safe.  However, I was unable to install a RAID mirroring system as intended (RAID level 1 systems have two hard drives, each being an exact copy of the other, so that any file that somehow gets corrupted due to hardware failure on one, is still good and can be recovered from the other).  I've sent a couple of notes to some friends who know more about RAID than I and will attempt to complete work and upgrade to the RAID system on Friday, same bat time, same bat channel.

Apologies in advance for the inconvenience,
I

[Cleo_Serapis]

THANKS SO MUCH IMHOTEP!
 :dance:  :cloud9:  :wolf:  :dragon:

[Guest_Jox_*]

Thanks Peter; much obliged.

It sounds like you had fun (i.e. didn't). I've used a raid L1 system and the set-up can be very confusing... and I wasn't even installing it. Sympathy!

Thanks again for your sterling efforts.

James.

[Imhotep]

Well, it could be worse.  It's mostly a matter of how motherboard RAID controller chips and UNIX systems don't necessarily play nicely together.  It's like WinModems - only part of the code is in the chip, the drivers do the rest.  Windows comes with the driver, containing the part that makes the system work right (to Windows the RAID is transparent, there are at least two physical drives, but you only see C: in explorer - the data mirroring etc is all transparent because of the driver's intervention).  Since Linux doesn't necessarily have all the drivers in it's code, it ignores the 'virtual' setting in BIOS and promptly says "Ooh, what have we here then?  Two drives, fine."  It then promptly gives each drive a letter.  Now, when you go format, partition, or whatever action you want on drive one, the BIOS part says "well, I'm supposed to be combining these drives, so let's format both.." and Linux says "but there are two drives, hey, wait a minute, what's going on with drive two, that's not right, what the heck?! I'm going to crash now."  

I copied all the non-system data to a new drive anyway, so now it's really just a matter of getting the automatic corruption protection installed rather than a 'when is it going to crash completely' thing like it was.

The nice thing about doing it this way is that since the old unit does still work, anything I forget to move is still available to copy over.

[Guest_Jox_*]

Thanks, Peter - that is interesting.

The system with which I had dealings was based on Win NT4 - so no Unix / Linux complications.

I do see the problem though (but not the solution, I'm afraid. Sorry.) Driver clashes are familiar to many computer users but when they affect the system at this low level (hard discs and BIOS, then it really is a problem.). I built the PC I'm using now and I was considering installing Raid I and Linux. In the end I did neither (Some important progs I have only run well under Windows and I simply saved money on a hard disc). So I feel lucky that I didn't have to go through this. Mind you, if I had the I might be of more use now.

Still, most interesting and thank you for explaining. Good luck and, if you have time, please do let us know what the work-round is (when discovered!).

Cheers and good luck, again,

James.

PS If anyone notices my previous posting looked strange, I was deleting cookies at that stage so MM could not pick up the cookie with my details on.

J.

[AMETHYST]

Oh My ... All of this technical stuff scares me so much...Just reading this thread is giving me hiives and my head is swimming in terminology I envy that others understand so easily... Well, admire is more the word I am looking for. Peter, you are amazing... And the Success and progress of MM shows the intellectual and technical excellence of its administrators. God Bless it and both of you...

Hugs, Liz

[Imhotep]

Actually, with some research still to be done I'm going to postpone further work until Monday.

Enjoy!
I

[Cleo_Serapis]

Testing new RAID system

[Imhotep]

OK, I've moved all the forum data over to the new RAID array and re-installed the server in it's permanent location.  No further planned reboots/outages/etc are anticipated at this time.

Enjoy!
I

[Cleo_Serapis]

Thanks so much I!

[Guest_Jox_*]

Hi - just for info

The system crashed a few minutes ago. back now (axiomatic!)

Thanks Peter - well done. You seem to have found a work-round which worked.

James.

[Imhotep]

Yea, that was me.  I had it running for a couple of hours on the testbench before closing up all the panels.

Joy joy joy ;0

The workaround is actually to do it right - RAID controller (all-hardware) and a 4 bay RAID drive cage.  It'll now take both drives completely frying at the same time to cause a data problem, and if one of the drives does fry the plug-n-pray drive cage allows the swapping of the defective unit without powering down the system.  Once the new drive is installed the controller automagically rebuilds the mirror image on the new disc and viola, fully redundant again.  Course this doesn't stop the site from going down if there's a power failure.

Eventually I'll have to figure out the power consumption.  Might be useful to get a UPS with a couple of hour capacity to run the server and router incase of a commercial power outage....

Oh well, things to worry about later.