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Clean-Up in Transporter Room 3!
The data center required my presence today. Indeed, it was very needy.
We've been FedEx-ing a two terabyte USB-based hard drive between the DC and San Francisco for weeks. It gets loaded up with data here in my data center, then I send it along to the backup data center to populate the newly created disaster recovery databases. On Tuesday, the drive arrived back in DC for another load but I couldn't get it mounted on the desired server. After an hour of trying every trick I knew, I gave up and brought the drive home to reformat overnight.
Once I plugged it into a workstation at home, I became aware of something I couldn't detect over the din of the servers in the data center: it was making an unusual clicking/wheezing sound which no hard drive was ever meant to produce.
It's times like this I'd love to pack an accelerometer into the box with whatever I'm shipping, just to see how much of a pounding a small box receives when being shipped across the continent.
This morning, I was a little cleverer about replacing the hard drive. Instead of buying a sealed unit, I bought a SATA disk enclosure and a 2TB hard drive separately. I was able to confirm the enclosure could handle the data center's 240V electrical system before purchasing instead of making an educated guess about a home office unit. I didn't have to worry about the devices having some magic build-in software which would interfere with my server's ability to find the disk. I didn't have to worry about pre-existing partitions or built-in pseudo-drives of device drivers getting in the way. And if the disk does die again, I can replace the disk only, saving some money.
Sure enough, once I arrived at the data center, I was able to slap the drive into the new enclosure, plug it into the server and have it recognized immediately. Reformatting it for ext3 took a little while but even that was speedier than I expected. Data is being written as I type this. Yay!
I'm expecting ten new servers to arrive for installation in the next couple of weeks. While waiting for the drive to format, I inventoried my network cables: I need more black cables. My network cables are color-coded by function: black for serial consoles, red for TCP/IP-based consoles, blue for primary data, grey for backup data, yellow for out-facing DMZ cables, white for in-facing DMZ cables, etc.. I also need more crossover adapters for our OpenGear serial console.
The new servers are going to require network switches as well. I had two older HP ProCurve models in inventory so they're now racked up, powered on and working. I'm always happy when old hardware powers up without problems and/or spontaneous combustion.
Alas, a replacement hard drive for a failed disk in one Windows server hasn't arrived yet. I'm optimistic it will arrive by the time the USB disk is loaded with data so I only have to make one trip tomorrow to tackle the rest of my list.
We've been FedEx-ing a two terabyte USB-based hard drive between the DC and San Francisco for weeks. It gets loaded up with data here in my data center, then I send it along to the backup data center to populate the newly created disaster recovery databases. On Tuesday, the drive arrived back in DC for another load but I couldn't get it mounted on the desired server. After an hour of trying every trick I knew, I gave up and brought the drive home to reformat overnight.
Once I plugged it into a workstation at home, I became aware of something I couldn't detect over the din of the servers in the data center: it was making an unusual clicking/wheezing sound which no hard drive was ever meant to produce.
It's times like this I'd love to pack an accelerometer into the box with whatever I'm shipping, just to see how much of a pounding a small box receives when being shipped across the continent.
This morning, I was a little cleverer about replacing the hard drive. Instead of buying a sealed unit, I bought a SATA disk enclosure and a 2TB hard drive separately. I was able to confirm the enclosure could handle the data center's 240V electrical system before purchasing instead of making an educated guess about a home office unit. I didn't have to worry about the devices having some magic build-in software which would interfere with my server's ability to find the disk. I didn't have to worry about pre-existing partitions or built-in pseudo-drives of device drivers getting in the way. And if the disk does die again, I can replace the disk only, saving some money.
Sure enough, once I arrived at the data center, I was able to slap the drive into the new enclosure, plug it into the server and have it recognized immediately. Reformatting it for ext3 took a little while but even that was speedier than I expected. Data is being written as I type this. Yay!
I'm expecting ten new servers to arrive for installation in the next couple of weeks. While waiting for the drive to format, I inventoried my network cables: I need more black cables. My network cables are color-coded by function: black for serial consoles, red for TCP/IP-based consoles, blue for primary data, grey for backup data, yellow for out-facing DMZ cables, white for in-facing DMZ cables, etc.. I also need more crossover adapters for our OpenGear serial console.
The new servers are going to require network switches as well. I had two older HP ProCurve models in inventory so they're now racked up, powered on and working. I'm always happy when old hardware powers up without problems and/or spontaneous combustion.
Alas, a replacement hard drive for a failed disk in one Windows server hasn't arrived yet. I'm optimistic it will arrive by the time the USB disk is loaded with data so I only have to make one trip tomorrow to tackle the rest of my list.
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Those who are do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
http://www.shockwatch.com/shipping_handling_monitors/impact_indicator/index.php
Hard disks used to be much more fragile than they are today. Up to the late 70's these little doohickies were stuck to each and every box containing a fragile component. They're still available today, and run somewhere around $5 each in quantity.
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As for fragile drives, remember not so many years ago when "stiction" was a frequent issue on some workstations and pounding the beast was a completely appropriate repair technique? Ah, the good old days.
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In the old days it was very, very important to verify that a disk pack was undamaged, because unlike today's self-contained hard drives, the platters themselves were removed from the drive for shipping. A slightly bent platter would ruin a very, very expensive drive mechanism, and it would make the devil's own noise while it happened!
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I should know, I work in a fairly busy mail processing center at our client site and even if it says fragile on the box, it still often gets treated rough, just not as rough as most everything else, and too many people try to reuse boxes for shipping and we've had many parcels come through our mailroom split open from just use and over loaded to boot, weighing at least 20Lbs or more so massive amounts of packing tape are required, just to get it to the recipient on the campus.