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Tuesday, October 30 2007, 10:47 AM

This past saturday I spent the whole day at work. Over twelve hours. The day was boring for the most part, tedious, and I even fell asleep once or twice at my desk. Not good you say? The thing is, I wasn't working. I was migrating data off my personal RAID array so that i could expand it to encompass the second RAID cabinet that I just finished acquiring disks for.

This whole saga goes back to the beginning of the summer. I was in the middle of a pretty large eBay binge, all the while buying tons of compter stuff I didn't really need. While I certainly didn't need the stuff, having it around has allowed me to further my knowledge in things like Xen and play with other cool technologies like ATA over Ethernet (AoE). Anyway, during my browsing, I came across a RAID cabinet completely loaded out with 18GB drives pretty much identical to one I had purchased earlier on. The price was pretty cheap, so I nabbed it.

The customary week passed while UPS ground transported the 100 pound-plus package from its origins on the west coast to its new home in Lansing. When it arrvied, I eagerly opened up the box and inventoried its contents, only to find that I wasn't given all that I was promised. The RAID cabinet itself, the full compliment of twelve 18GB drives, and the mounting rails were all there, but the two external SCSI cables were missing. I promptly got in touch with the seller, and he assured me that it was just an oversight and that he would send the cables right away. Right away turned into a couple of weeks. I finally received the delivery, only to find that he had sent the wrong cables. They would easily fit into the ports on the back of the RAID card in my server, but the other end had the wrong connector type, and wouldn't connect to the RAID enclosure. I got back in touch with the seller again, and he again promised to right the wrong, and at no charge. Well, those cables never arrived. I was ticked, but I got over it.

Over the next few months I replaced the 18GB disks with 36GB disks so that I could merge the second RAID cabinet into my current RAID array, which is comprised of 36GB disks. Used 36GB drives are relatively inexpensive on eBay so I was able to get the requisite number of disks without too much expense. I also ordered the cables that I was denied in my original purchase.

All the pieces were in place last week, so I decided to try getting everything set up. I got everything put together and connected this past thursday night, and started the process of finalizing things. The RAID card I'm using in the machine (a Compaq/HP Smart Array 5304-128) supports live expansion of an array onto new disks, so I fired up that process from the command line array management utility. I was mildly surprised that I could only extend onto seven of the twelve disks in the second RAID cabinet. I figured that it was just something in the way the expansion algorithm worked, and that I'd be able to expand onto the other disks when the initial expansion finished.

Rearranging 500GB of data on disks is not a quick process, so I had to wait a good twelve hours before I would discover that I was not able to expand the array onto those remaning five disks. I searched around for possible reasons why I was having difficulty and found nothing concrete. I did come across a blurb somewhere that mentioned RAID6 allowing for more disks than RAID5 in an array, which didn't really seem correct to me, but I decided to try converting the array to RAID6 anyway. Another twelve hours later, I discovered that didn't work either.

I decided to completely redo the RAID array from scratch, which leads us to last saturday. I was up pretty early, so I made myself a big breakfast and headed into work to do the deed. I got started copying the data off the RAID array, which was no quick process. It takes a while to copy over a hundred gigabytes of data. During this time, I played some games on the laptop, walked around the datacenter, chatted with people, and took a few naps. There's a surprisingly comfortable position I've discovered on my desk where I can just zonk right out.... when I'm not working of course! Anyway, once the data was copied off, I recreated the RAID array and was glad to see that I could use all the disks to their full capacity.

I began the process of copying data back onto the array, and settled in for another nap. I awoke a short time later to find that one of the drives in the array had croaked. It turned out to be one of the disks in the newest group I had purchased, and not really tested all that thoroughly. A disk failure sounds bad, but in RAID6, up to two disks in the array can fail without any data loss. So, in this case, it was just an annoyance. The RAID card detected the failure and immediately started working to rebuild the failed disk's data on one of the hot spares I have configured. This process slowed down the data transfer pretty substantially, so I was there for a lot longer than I wanted to be. I replaced the failed disk with one of my leftover disks, and the array was happy again.

So, now I have a nice RAID6 array composed of 26 36GB SCSI drives and two hot spares. It weighs in at around 860GB total, and takes up 11U worth of space on the racks at work. I find it pretty funny that there are now single SATA drives that can store more data than that entire array, but they are nowhere near as cool. I have the blinky light factor on my side, as evidenced here...

aoe ebay raid scsi xen

Monday, June 11 2007, 3:10 PM

The past few weeks have been a lot of the same old same old. A few noteworthy events have happened though.

About two weeks ago, I noticed a strange smell in my car. I couldn't place it, and it wasn't very strong, so I ignored it and went to work. A few hours later, when I went to grab something out of my car, I noticed the smell again. I looked around, and found the source. I had left a gallon of milk in the trunk. It sat there for two or three days I figure, plenty long enough to go bad in the hot summer sun. It had leaked about a quarter to a third of its fluid components out into the trunk lining, and it smelled pretty bad. I immediately threw it away, and used a hose at work to wash the trunk lining out the best I could. The crappy thing is that it leaked down into the piece of fiberboard that seperates the trunk from the spare tire compartment. It soaked in there, and I couldn't really clean it. I gave it a good dousing with febreeze, and that seemed to do the trick for a few days, but I've been noticing that the smell is returning. It's not really bad, and can be easily subdued by opening a window or turning on the HVAC fans. It still stinks though (pun intended). Hopefully the bacteria will run out of raw materials soon, and the smell will go away on its own.

Last week, my brand new TV decided to die. I was attempting to plug my laptop into the VGA connector to see how things looked, but the TV shut itself off before I could enable the external VGA out on the laptop. This is normal behavior when a VGA signal can't be found. What isn't normal behavior is that the TV won't power on now. I called Polariod tech support, and the customer service rep seemed genuinely surprised about it. I can't blame him, because it makes no sense. It has to be some sort of buggy firmware or something similar, becuase there's no reason why a TV should power itself off, and then refuse to power on again, unless it's expressing a hatred of Star Trek or something. The customer support guy got in contact with a local repair company, and they'll be out tomorrow to have a look at it. With my recent luck with home theater components, it'll be broken, and the repair people will have it for a few months. Grand. It's less than two months old.

I also really need to stop browsing eBay. It's a really bad idea. The purchases I made last month had more of an effect on my bank account that I realized at the time. Lesson learned I suppose.

ebay frustrations grandprix polaroid-3211-tlxb

Monday, April 30 2007, 2:08 AM

More news regarding cool new stuff. My old TV has been going south for, well, like 5 years. It used to belong to my grandmother, and it came to me quite a while ago. It's been getting pretty bad lately, so I decided to take my income tax money and get a new TV. I initially planned to get a new standard definition TV with a digital tuner, but I found a 32" LCD TV (Polaroid 3211-TLXB) on sale for a reasonable price. It's got all of the inputs that I was looking for - VGA, HDMI, and Component. My DVD player doesn't seem to output a good Component signal, so I'm stuck with using S-Video for now. Oh well, I'll live.

I also need to stop going to eBay. The server I bought is working quite well, but my tendency as an impulse spender could easily get the best of me. I already bought two more servers. One is a dual P3 1Ghz with six 36GB SCSI drives that I bought mostly for the SCSI drives. The other is a Quad P3-level Xeon machine with 2GB of RAM. Having a quad-CPU machine just sounded cool. While I was looking through some of the eBay stores, I found an external twelve drive RAID enclosure that would connect perfectly to the dual P3 machine. I shouldn't buy it since I don't really need it, but it would be cool. Someone stop me!

compaq dl580 ebay hp lc2000r netserver polaroid-3211-tlxb

Saturday, April 21 2007, 4:30 AM

The past few days have been a rollercoaster ride of hardware gains and losses. The first involved my web server. On wednesday I decided to upgrade the operating system on the box to the newly released CentOS 5, which supports Xen natively. I brought in a seperate machine to handle the Xen environments so I could perform the upgrade at my own pace. I was successful in getting everything moved over, and the OS upgrade went flawlessly. The issues arose when I tried to insert an IDE card to get around a nagging problem with DMA on my hard drives. Well, that didn't go so well. The case in that machine is huge, and the IDE cables just weren't long enough to reach the IDE card. So, I decided to put everything back te way it was and to deal with it. Well, the machine had different plans. When I put everything back together, the machine wouldn't boot. The diagnostic LEDs on the motherboard indicated a problem with the CPUs, and it wouldn't boot. It remains in that state.

I was pretty despondent over the breakdown, but I decided not to let the hardware I had go to waste. I looked on eBay, and found a server of similar vintage and capability, in 2U rack mount form. It has dual Pentium III 1.4GHz processors, a gigabyte of RAM, and six 18.2GB SCSI drives. It has the same RAID card that my existing server has, so I'll be able to make a nice somewhat-large RAID5 array. I'll have the two 18.2GB drives from my dead server as spares, and the 2GB of RAM from the original server will combine nicely with the 1GB of RAM from the new server. This gem came pretty cheap too... I won it for the paltry sum of $162.50. It should be here monday. Yay for me!

Not too long before I won the auction, I got a call from Circuit City saying that my receiver was ready for pickup. Since they actually ordered parts to fix it, I had confidence that it would finally be fixed. It was. Finally. Everything's hooked back up again, and I'm pretty happy. It's nice to have everything back the way it was.

ebay frustrations homeaudio linux onkyo-tx-sr603 xen

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