[BBLISA] Fwd: Re: Fileserver opinion

[Ben Eisenbraun]

Hi Daniel,

> The FreeBSD or Linux Raid will require downtime for drive failures, and
> in my experience a rebuild is probably not possible - the files will need
> to be copied afresh from the surving drive onto a new partition.

I know you have a lot of personal experience to back that up, but my
personal experience has been to the contrary.  I admin a few, and have
access to at least a few more, boxes running RAID 1/5/10 using Linux md,
and the rebuilds have been done online and without data loss.

The box with multiple RAID 5s has a reputation among my geek social group
for killing disks, and we had 6-8 disk failures a year over a several year
period on the machine that required rebuilds of the RAIDs, and we still
haven't lost any data.

The sysadmin for that machine is a bit of wizard though, and I do recall he
had to do some magic with ddrescue during one of the recoveries.

> Is it a bit odd that the indication of a failed drive is so subtle. Has
> anyone seen a package to do surveilance and notification for RAID groups
> on FOSS operating systems?

Are you not using mdmonitor?  I get emails from all my hosts when arrays
are degraded due to drive failure.

-ben

--
copyright infringement is your best entertainment value.
                                      <douglas coupland>