[NBLUG/talk] Raid 1 saved our butts

[Walter Hansen]

Well this morning I foudn that one of our IBM SCSI hard drives on our
Database server was fried. The system was behaving oddly. I coudn't even
log in and the screen was plastered with raid error messages, but MySQL
was still returning some information. I powered it down and then powered
it back up and it complained but came up fine. I've now ran IBM's
diagnostic (actually Hitachi) and it's definately bad. Also the mirror
drive is apparantly bad with shock damage, but Linux never complained
about it.

Their finally paying the $40 for a 20gig tape for me to back the thing up
on and I'm sending the one drive in and once it's installed and updated
I'll remove the other drive and send it in.

Also I discovered that the drives have a heat problem. I'd never removed
the drive box before and when I pulled it both drives were too hot to
hold. Their mounted at the bottom and it's a rackmount Server box with the
little key/glass area in front of the drives. I think I'll get one of
those two or three fan face plates and mount it in front of the one drive
with some pointing in and some pointing out (as the face plates are under
glass) so that there is at least some air circulation down there. There is
only one face plate as the second drive is actually below the plate
mounted a half inch from the first.

Their 10,000rpm 18G 68pin 160 SCSI drives but I don't see much of a way to
modify thier mounting locations. Funny, but I think a tower case would be
more robust and better circulated.

I don't really need help, although I seem to have forgotten a lot about
Raid-1 since I installed it, but comments and suggestions are welcome. I
just thought it was an interesting thing to have happen and was worth
metioning.

Oh, it's a RH 9.0 system with dual PIII-700s. Really a sweet system and
our company is going to come to depend on it more and more in the next few
months. It could probably use more memory as it's only 256 as I remember,
but bugeting is tight right now.



                                         Walter Hansen