On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 11:14:24AM +0930, Robinson, Greg wrote: > Sorry for the top posting, but I'll echo Doug's points. > > We had something similar a few years back. I wasn't directly involved, > but the things I did notice were: > > 1. Locating the failed drive was extremely difficult. We ran linux with > md's. Software location was ok, but the hardware didn't correspond. > Like Doug has said, the MegaCLI probably got in the way.
Yeah, I have that problem on even my 4 disk md local disk systems I have. What I do is verify that the light is dark (and the other drives are lit) before yanking anything. This works okay on traditional hot-swap down the front chassis, as every one has an activity and a failure light. If the disk is failing smart but still in the raid and active, I fail it out of the raid. Now, I haven't gotten the failure lights working, but the activity lights work okay, and in the rare case that my disks aren't getting hammered, it's easy enough to generate activity. Did the top-loading chassis lack per-disk activity lights on each drive? I mean, getting better mapping from the /dev/sdX name to a physical drive would be nice, but as far as I can tell is largely impossible on Linux. Best I can do is to label the front of each drive caddy with the last 6 digits of the drive serial number. Of course, when a drive fails good, you can't read it's serial number, so it's a game of reading out the serial numbers that it's /not/ and looking for the one that it is, something that would be quite irritating on a 36 or 45 bay chassis. > 2. It had 1 system disk!! When that failed, or had read errors, the > faith in the system went out the door. Trying to rebuild onto another > disk was a nightmare. I can't seem to see where number of systems disks > is mentioned in the specs. Well, my plan is to build the system myself, and I'm not the sort to leave anything unmirrored. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
