You know how the Chinese give names to their years. Like, the Year of the Dragon, and the Year of the Monkey, and so forth?
This is the week of the Raid Failure.
Got a page this morning, waking me from what had been a fairly restless night, so I was none to happy at being dragged out of bed half an hour before I was due to get up. It was one of the network engineers, who wanted me to know that the server on my workbench was beeping loudly and was there anyway to make it stop. I had him log in on the console and shut the box down, as it’s not in production and could stand to be switched off until I got to the office.
After my morning meeting, I came back to my desk and fired it up to see what was up. As soon as it got to the SCSI initialization phase, it started wailing. I had a sinking feeling I know what that meant, so I escaped into the RAID controller’s config screen to see. Yep, there’s a bad disk. This box only has three drives, so it actually has no spare to pull in in case of disk failure; when you lose one, it is automatically in degraded mode.
I started a rebuild, and will now have to see about getting a replacement drive before I can wrap this project up. My only consolation is that at least it failed today, rather than this time next week after I had shipped it to the customer’s site in Kentucky.
Apologies for all the work stuff this week, but it’s what’s consuming most of my attention the last few days. (Well, there’s some non-work stuff, but I’m not ready to talk about that yet. <G>)
sdelmonte
Raid failure? My first thought about that is “well, you know how fast bugs adapt to poisons.” Clearly, I’ve lived in NYC apartments all my life.
Rob Wynne
The computer industry is powered by acronyms. 🙂
Just in case anyone doesn’t know, RAID is “Redundant Array of Inexpensive[1] Disks”, and is used to make an array of smaller disks act like they’re one large disk. (at least, as it’s being implemented here. It can also be used to make a simple mirror, so that if one drive fails the other takes over seamlessly.
[1] I’ve also seen this written as “Independent”
redaxe
Is this a second-generation box for that customer? If so, would that make the sound a heir-RAID siren? [grins and ducks]
It’s probably better that it failed before shipping; the consequences of a failure at the customer’s site are all far more time-consuming and less fun.
*hug*
Rob Wynne
Oh, I agree completely! It’s just that I’ve had a string of these this week, and it’s a bit frustrating. 🙂
The array rebuilt clean, but I am going to have the disk replaced before I ship it anyway, just to be safe.
hrrunka
Is there an epidemic? Our systems folk have been muttering about having had five once-in-five-years failures in the last six weeks…
browngirl
Oh, how *dare* you write about work. 🙂
*huggles*
sarekofvulcan
Oh, man, I feel for you. 🙂