OT:Exchange good? - And the flame wars begin (Was:Re:newhotness?)

[JD Austin]

On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 8:55 AM, Eric Shubert <ejs at shubes.net> wrote:

> Ben Browning wrote:
> > Eric Shubert wrote:
> >> Nice piece, Ben. I might add that with a reduction in hardware comes
> >> an increase in reliability.
> >
> > To some degree, anyway... In N+1 clustering solutions, more hardware
> > leads to better stability.
>
> Good point. My thinking context was in the absence of clustering and
> raid. These are must-use technologies for stability.
>
> > I once had two servers with mission-critical
> > services on them both throw hard drive fits one night(they had 2x scsi
> > drives, but not RAIDED as we were using one exclusively for mail queue
> > IO), so I simply limped them along long enough to drain their queues and
> > halted them, dealing with them the next afternoon...
> >
>
> Interesting.
>
> I heard a story of a system with 2 raid1 drives. The drives came from
> the same lot which had a manufacturing defect. They died at the same
> time! :(
>
> >> I worked on a server some time ago that had SCSI drives which had a
> >> MTBF of 36 years. The server had 72 of them. One failed every 6
> >> months, like clockwork.
> >
> > I had a RAID under my control that had not been powered down in 5 years.
> > When we finally did, half the drives did not spin back up :)
>
> Amazing what a little static friction can do!
>
> --
> -Eric 'shubes'
>
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Just last night I had a weird issue with a file server with Raid...
it wasn't until I plugged in my KVM that it became obvious why the file
server wasn't accessible:
No operating system found
I rebooted and it was fine.
Then I unplugged my KVM cables and pushed it back into the rack (it is a
plain 4u pc style case) and the problem re-appeared.  I plugged in the
cables again and tried to login and got an error that it wasn't able to
write the GDM file.  I rebooted and got the same No operating system found
error.  I removed the side cover and checked out each plug that the drives
were plugged into.  It was when I was making sure that the raid controller
card was properly seated that I noticed just how THIN it was.  Apparently
the raid controller card is so thin that merely sliding it back into the
rack is enough to drop connection to the drives.

--
JD Austin
Twin Geckos Technology Services LLC
jd at twingeckos.com
480.288.8195x201
http://www.twingeckos.com


Samuel Goldwyn  - "I read part of it all the way through."
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