c7f is down

Sat Jul 15 13:10:46 PDT 2006

Quick update: bought 1.2 TB of disk space at Fry's, and the new machine shipped yesterday and will be here next week. Dead drive appears to have no bad blocks, but large amount of filesystem corruption. Restoring directly from that drive will result in the least data loss, so that's what I'm trying to do now, although fsck has a big todo list. Thank you to those of you who've chipped in money.

Fri Jul 14 05:04:53 PDT 2006

Due to the second hard disk failure in less than a month, c7f is down and I don't have access to any spare drives with which to do recovery (except the one on which backups are kept, but messing with that drive is a bad idea.) Here's what I'm doing to fix this:

Acquiring a spare drive by stopping at Fry's tomorrow (Friday) after work.
Do the recovery, hopefully have the site back by Monday.
Adding power conditioning to make sure PG&E isn't causing frequent drive failure with high voltage. Should get that in place some time next week.
Replacing pashto with a whole new system, since that's much easier and cheaper than burning through drives and parts trying to figure out what's causing frequent failure of drives. The new machine, which I've already ordered, has a 2.8GHz P4, 1GB of RAM and will have 4x 250GB drives in a RAID 5 configuration. That shipment should arrive before the end of July.

If you have any questions, just email me. "How can I help with this," you ask? I've got at least one idea: