Posts made by BRRABill

@scottalanmiller said:

And there we go! I love this new forking feature.

Are you using the work like in a FORK?

Because it could be funny another way, too.

Or even funnier both ways, which I am sure is how you mean it.

I kind of like that.

Mainly because since I drink, and am an anxious person, I"m always afraid I'll leave the wrong tip amount.

@scottalanmiller said:

Wow, a whole 512MB of RAM, huh?

That's also what the Synology DS214 I was looking at has.

@scottalanmiller said:

Have to be when you live in the third world like we do. I have to work in Cordoba day in and day out.

As a clueless American I don't know what any of these words mean.

I"m like Brick in Anchorman.

@scottalanmiller said:

He has to be able to get it in Qatar, though.

I noticed on top of everything else you guys do, you're also wizards at currency conversion.

@drewlander said:

@BRRABill Sounds like a situation I had to deal with last year where an organization was running Dell PowerEdge 2950 Gen II pizza boxes. I tried reasoning with them explaining that 9 year old servers should not be production machines for mission critical systems. They didn't seem to care about business continuity until they started failing.

This was a PowerEdge 2800. I've been kind of proud of the fact that I kept these things up and running for so long. And considering the low RAM and age, they still run awesome.

BUT ... like I said it's a miracle that things haven't gone south quicker. The second drive that failed was a replacement drive, which of course was not new.

Key point, as in anything, is to always have a good backup.

@scottalanmiller said:

While showering to get ready for dinner, the four year old slipped and fell in the tiled shower. All tile, big shower. Her feet went out backwards and she went face first onto the floor. There was much crying.

Ouch.

I'm not going to say exactly HOW old because I've not sure I can take any more heads shaking at me this month. LOL.

Well this server is from well before 2009.

It's a miracle nothing has happened yet.

The good news is I have everyone back up and running.

Oh. Phew.

What is the point of RAID if that happens?

That's it. I'm quitting IT.

I've had enough.

@scottalanmiller said:

@BRRABill SSDs do suffer from mechanically induced failed like Winchester drives.

Is the rate the same? Or is this a random (but common) thing?

Interesting. The second failed drive definitely sounded like it was dead...mechanical issue.

I think that happened to me a long time ago on a server, which is why I'm always nervous doing it.

THOUGH thanks to ML I'll never have another RAID 5 array, so no need to worry!

It doesn't do that for any other RAID level?

And I am assuming RAID 5 of SSDs wouldn't do that?

@scottalanmiller said:

You mentioned a disaster but did not get into details.

I posted a snippet on your RAID post. Our RAID array went poof!

I ask because I had an issue yesterday on our DELL server. Which, admittedly, is very, very old. Experienced, I should say. No one likes to be called old.

It's our main data server. One of two servers that really matter.

We have 4 drives in a RAID5 array. (This is from the dark ages when that was considered OK.)

I went into the server room for something else, and noticed one of the drives was blinking amber. I go from a 1 to a 5 on the 1 to 10 anxiety scale because that kind of stuff always makes me nervous. Anyway, no problem, I have spare drives on the shelf ready to go. I pull out the old drive. No problem. I put in the new drive, no problem. I go to log in to start rebuilding the array, and I notice that the server is rebooting. Hmm, that's odd. I look at the drive. Now TWO of the four are blinking amber. I've now gone to a 10, LOL.

Turns out a second drive failed after I did the hot plug. I'm not sure if it was just random (which seems unlikely) or something wierd happened during the hot plug.

I spent a long, long time getting everything back to how it was.

I think I may have alluded to it, but I got the pleasure of rebuilding an entire server yesterday. Our main server, which died in the middle of the afternoon.

Karma, i guess.

I'm going to eventually do a full writeup and post it in a separate thread.

@scottalanmiller said:

As we have seen this past fortnight, Windows licensing can be a pretty big deal. Eliminating all of the licensing overhead completely can be pretty big.

You are welcome.

Can you pull a hotplug drive out at any time, or is that dependent on server manufacturer and RAID card?

@angrydok Thanks for chiming in.

I looked into that as an option, but it has the same Microsoft licensing restrictions as all the other non-free products I was looking at.

Really the main sticking point now is the spinning up of the image to test its viability for a BMR. The workaround seems to be to actually perform the BMR in a test scenario, but I imagine your product has a virtual spinup component to it as well, right?

Though apples to apples, if I get licensing taken care of, free is surely nice.

I have moved away from desktop backups. Iwas receiving threats via PM, so I figured that was the way to go.

@scottalanmiller said:

Not really. Remember it is 100% optional. There are excellent non-Windows product choices for customers that don't want to invest in license management.

I just mean it seems ... overly complicated.