Thursday, March 13, 2008

RAID raided by demons

So I had the new server set up, and all seemed happy in Skill City.. until weird things started to happen.

I have never in my life, ever, had a drive go bad in a RAID array. I know... wtf?! I must be born under good stars.

However since starting work at my new day job I have never seen so many drives go bad at random before. Granted we have a lot of them here, so the odds are good that at some point one will fail.

But seriously I think my office is haunted by some kind of evil magnetic demon presence that just annihilates hard drives during it's poltergeist rages.

I logged on to Skill City and noticed that it was being cranky. Games wouldn't start, things seemed slow, but clicking on a game numerous times would eventually get it running.

"Are you having these issues?" I asked to Drew, who is currently fitting the software for the company who bought it. Oh didn't I mention that? We sold the code to a game company for a piece of cash. More on that later.

"No everything is fine here" Drew responds.

Indeed it was fine, for I discover today that my RAID 0 has a bad drive, it was going nutty, and today it finally ate itself. For those not technically inclined, a RAID 0 is the one where the R in RAID is pretend, because nothing about a RAID 0 is actually redundant. It just spews your data all over two drives or 100 drives and if one goes out, they all go out. Somebody was fond of Christmas Tree Light strings and followed the same basic principle I guess.

That means I have to re-initialize the array, then run disk checks to find out which hardware is bad (the controller, or the hard drive) and then probably toss both in the trash and build a new server with new drives and this time make it RAID 1 like I should have to begin with.

As if my new job wasn't already sucking out my every waking moment, it is nearly triathlon season and so I am starting to train more at the gym. I walk out the door to go to work at 8am. I usually walk from work at 9 or 10. I sleep at 10:30 so... I have about 30 minutes a day to devote to extra stuff like getting Skill City working.

Weekends you say? Piffle! Weekends are for mountain biking and binge eating girl scout cookies in front of Anime while I ponder a new game mechanic with my yellow legal pad and this little clicky pencil. This has done a lot to reinforce the fact that I can't draw, at all.

1 comment:

illgnosis said...

If you could draw what would I do?