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Welcome to IWETHEY!

New LEFT!
Me 2 ;-)
New RIGHT?
Great!
New ON!
So what happened?
I am out of the country for the duration of the Bush administration.
Please leave a message and I'll get back to you when democracy returns.
Expand Edited by tuberculosis Aug. 21, 2007, 06:11:28 AM EDT
New Carnivore, doubtless.
New Re: ON!
Twere an unscheduled machine migration after the old one's HD started horking stuff up.
Regards,

-scott anderson

"Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson..."
New Thanks!
Big thanks to Jason and Scott!!!
New Dang!
And I was so hoping to get on some one's "Enemy's List" :-p
New Was it something I said?
Thanks!

(* Twere an unscheduled machine migration after the old one's HD started horking stuff up. *)

What brand of HD? I am thinking of buying a new box, and want to know what to avoid.

I thot the outtage was perhaps something personal and I was being blocked based on IP address or a cookie or something. I tried to think if I posted anything to piss somebody off (lately). I was about to clean my cookies when suddenly a dancing penguin appeared on the site in a kind of "standby" mode.

Glad to know it is due to metalic hardware and not biological hardware (or grayware).
New It was you.
It's just that none of us wanted to tell you.
New Is that all?
Come on - it's been two weeks! - I expect tales of smoking circuit boards, halon floods, molten silicon, blood on the metal and hairbreadh escapes from the Ashcrofts Gestapo - at least!

"Unscheduled platform migration" - feeeh!
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
New Re: Is that all?
Funny - just a few weeks ago I had an "unscheduled migration" which was solved during "non-nominal work periods" in "a timely manner".

The Seagate disk responsible for the "unscheduled migration" later underwent "significant g force accretion" after an "improbable trajectory" carried into a brick wall at "a high rate of speed".
-drl
New I think I have never met a Seagate drive . . .
. . that did not deserve a high velocity introduction to a brick wall - at least not in the 3" drive era.

Of course the old 5" Seagates - you had to slam them against a brick wall every morning to get the heads unstuck from the platters.
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
New Re: I think I have never met a Seagate drive . . .
Their motto should be "If it's dead, it's a Seagate."
-drl
New Re: I think I have never met a Seagate drive . . .
I've got a pair of 10G Barracudas right here that have been just peachy for the past two years.

Noisy, but fast'n'good.

As y'all know, I tend a herd of about 150 desktop PCs, plus about 200-250 development machines (of all flavours), plus the usual array of weird shit kit, plus a couple of dozen servers.

The number one failing drive manufacturer?

Maxtor. By a country mile. Thankfully Dell saw the light and reinstituted their policy of letting experienced IT departments diagnose dead disks and suchlike and then just sending out the part (with the farked part being collected), instead of insisting that the whole unit be returned to Milton Keynes.

I've sent quite a few Maxtors back - it seems to be mainly the units under 10G and especially the 8G ones that suck. They're slow, too.


Peter
[link|http://www.debian.org|Shill For Hire]
[link|http://www.kuro5hin.org|There is no K5 Cabal]
[link|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org|Blog]
New Bad hard drives
Quantum are about as bad as I have seen. I've seen a lot of them fail, I also remember Apple getting a bad batch of them and claiming that the hard drive was the problem, not the Macintosh. Quantum drives do make great paperweights.

Wester Digital as well, but then I've had mixed luck, mostly good on them, while others I know (like my brother) have had nothing but bad luck with WD drives.

[link|http://games.speakeasy.net/data/files/khan.jpg|"Khan!!!" -Kirk]
New Re: Bad hard drives
Quantum disks are among the best I've seen for reliability and performance.

I'm basing this on a bunch of servers with RAID 5 disk arrays built from Quantum Atlas V disks.

They just don't fail.


Peter
[link|http://www.debian.org|Shill For Hire]
[link|http://www.kuro5hin.org|There is no K5 Cabal]
[link|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org|Blog]
New Mine did
perhaps they built the IDE 80M drives differently back then? I imagine they got better QC when they started making the RAID drives?

[link|http://games.speakeasy.net/data/files/khan.jpg|"Khan!!!" -Kirk]
New All brands fail at a fairly high rate.
Particular models and particular manufacturing runs within any particular brand may have unusually high failure rates. The result is that some people think a particular brand is great, and others think it's trash - depends on whether they got one of those lots. I remember one Toshiba model I used years ago, where every single drive died in less than two years (with loud clanking noises).

I had particularly good luck with Fujitsu, but they've pulled out of the desktop drive business. Haven't had any IBM IDE failures, but haven't used that many of their drives (and they're cashing in the drive chips too). Have had more failures than I like with IBM SCSI drives, but not as bad as Seagate (never used any of those 80-Gig IBMs which failed early and often). I've never liked Maxtors much, but there's not a lot left right now with consistent availability.

A lot of system builders swear by Western Digital, but my experience hasn't been that good (and I'm very annoyed that jumpering is different between "single" and "master", so you have to change jumpers if you add or remove anything else on the cable. That alone disqualifies them as far as I'm concerned.

Seagates have just given me bad experiences more consistently than other brands. Their early 3" drives were the worst ever - I couldn't get them out the door before they failed.
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
New Re: All brands fail at a fairly high rate.
I exactly concur - early IBM SCSI tended to fail. I think IBM SCSI were actually made by Seagate. Seagates have failed more often than any other drives I can remember. The last of the Model 95s were sold with Maxtor SCSI drives.

BTW someone mentioned Quantum Atlas - these are now Maxtor Atlas (just bought one :).

Did you say IBM is giving up its disk business? Why?

Also exact same experience with those great Fujitsu tank drives (beige metal case). One interesting them about them - they seemed to ship with the write cache disabled. Adaptec Ez-SCSI could be used to turn it on, with dramatic effects.
-drl
New Yes, IBM is dumping hard disks
Their hard disk business is going to a "joint venture" with Hitachi, but the implication was that IBM was not the major partner.

The stated reason is profitability, but I've also read about some stuff in IBM's labs that could obsolete hard disks. Perhaps it's a little farther along than recent articles have indicated.
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
New *Ulp*____What a nonsequitur___ stock assessment time?
New Re: Yes, IBM is dumping hard disks
I still find it curious, because AFAIK IBM is mostly responsible for the basic magnetic materials and magneto-resistive head research that made giant drives possible. See this graphic:

<img src="[link|http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/ipl/oem/images/techimages/fig1.jpg"|http://www.storage....es/fig1.jpg"]>

-drl
New Reminds me of an idiot...
There was a guy at Microsoft (don't all my "reminds me of an idiot" stories start that way?) who thought that the Seagate Cheetah was the best hard drive in the world. Never mind that they died 3 months after he bought them - he thought that it was great that they would keep sending him replacement hard drives!

Whotta idjit.
End of world rescheduled for day after tomorrow. Something should probably be done. Please advise.
New Similar phenomenon
There was a guy at Microsoft (don't all my "reminds me of an idiot" stories start that way?)
When I was tending bar in college, someone told me:
All the best stories I've got of funny things that happened to me seem to start the same way: First I had six shots of Jose Cuervo, then me and my new friend ...
===
Microsoft offers them the one thing most business people will pay any price for - the ability to say "we had no choice - everyone's doing it that way." -- [link|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=38978|Andrew Grygus]
New Re: Is that all?
Well, for awhile now the box had been throwing really funky errors:

FAT bread failed.

And would just spam the screen. I couldn't find anything on what would cause that, and it didn't seem to cause any problems. So, I just continued to let it spam the screen.

Then, about 3-4 weeks ago, the box went down. I got to the console to find:

hda1: read/write failed (status: busy)

Or some such. Box frozen, this message spamming the screen every 1-3 seconds.

I reboot. Upon reboot, lo and behold, someone/something had flubbed glibc 2.2 and SSHD wouldn't start, and a few other really icky things. That's when I posted to the Linux boards here for possible solutions. No luck.

So, we flew blind for a couple of weeks until the same issue came up. At this point, I knew this was going to be a consistent problem.

We were already 2 weeks out, probably, from switching to the new server. Everything at the host is going to rack mountable boxes; the old box was a ATX minitower case, this new box is a 2U rack mount (Intel ISP somethingsomething). So, given the downtime, and the need, I went ahead and "pulled the trigger".

The new box is a dual P4-750MHz, 1 GB of RAM, 2-10GB SCSI HDs. SuSE 7.3 Professional.

The old box was a Athlon 1.4GHz, 384 MBs of RAM, 1-15 GB IDE HD (WD, btw, Tabby). Mandrake 7.2.

This new box screams comparatively.

So, installed the new box, brought it up on the network. Moved DNS (that's when everyone saw the default Apache site). Then took the old box to my house and threw it on my network at home.

Now, how to get access to the box so that Scott can work his magic with Zope/zIWT, and manage to transfer stuff off, otherwise? I'm far from being a Linux guru. I know much more then I used to, but I'm still far from guru status. I'd say I'm at "alright" status. ;)

With that in mind, I wasn't able to fix the SSHD issue or open telnet. I was floundering. So, I just decided to install VNC. Installed VNC, poked a hole in my home firewall.

All was well. 2 days later, everything was back online.

So, no great stories of flaming piles of smoking hardware. But, regardless, it was still quite a task. I'm lucky my wife was out of town for 2 weeks, as there were a few really late nights. :) And, she just *loves* that! :P

Anyways, thanks for everyone's patience. I apologize for the downtime. Hopefully this will be the last time we have to deal with that.


-Jason

----

My pid is Inigo Montoya. You "killed -9" my parent process. Prepare to vi.
New FAT bread failed
Based on [link|http://www.redhat-linux.com.my/faq/boot10.html|this] it is possible that Linux thought there was a FAT partition, tried to do a binary read, and that failed.

No idea why that would be the case for you, but at least you know that you are not alone in seeing that error message.

Cheers,
Ben
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
-- Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (1930-2002)
New Interesting. Pierre is in the Charlotte (NC) LUG.
Alex

"Resort is had to ridicule when reason is against us." -- Thomas Jefferson
     FIRST! - (admin) - (29)
         SECOND! - (Yendor) - (28)
             THIRD? - (Simon_Jester) - (27)
                 LEFT! - (mmoffitt) - (26)
                     RIGHT? - (hnick) - (25)
                         ON! - (tuberculosis) - (24)
                             Carnivore, doubtless. -NT - (mmoffitt)
                             Re: ON! - (admin) - (22)
                                 Thanks! - (slugbug)
                                 Dang! - (mmoffitt)
                                 Was it something I said? - (tablizer) - (1)
                                     It was you. - (mmoffitt)
                                 Is that all? - (Andrew Grygus) - (17)
                                     Re: Is that all? - (deSitter) - (13)
                                         I think I have never met a Seagate drive . . . - (Andrew Grygus) - (12)
                                             Re: I think I have never met a Seagate drive . . . - (deSitter)
                                             Re: I think I have never met a Seagate drive . . . - (pwhysall) - (10)
                                                 Bad hard drives - (orion) - (7)
                                                     Re: Bad hard drives - (pwhysall) - (6)
                                                         Mine did - (orion)
                                                         All brands fail at a fairly high rate. - (Andrew Grygus) - (4)
                                                             Re: All brands fail at a fairly high rate. - (deSitter) - (3)
                                                                 Yes, IBM is dumping hard disks - (Andrew Grygus) - (2)
                                                                     *Ulp*____What a nonsequitur___ stock assessment time? -NT - (Ashton)
                                                                     Re: Yes, IBM is dumping hard disks - (deSitter)
                                                 Reminds me of an idiot... - (inthane-chan) - (1)
                                                     Similar phenomenon - (drewk)
                                     Re: Is that all? - (jlalexander) - (2)
                                         FAT bread failed - (ben_tilly) - (1)
                                             Interesting. Pierre is in the Charlotte (NC) LUG. -NT - (a6l6e6x)

Do you know what the chain of command is? It's the chain I'll BEAT YOU WITH until you realize who's in command.
191 ms