Sometime during July another drive failed on the CD server. Apparently the cooling went out again and the drives heated up. A new drive is on overnight delivery and should be ready by the weekend.

We got a drive shipped to us and it's currently rebuilding the RAID set. All should be good soon.

The replacement drive for the CD server arrived and was swapped.

Apparently drive 6 is the middle slot on the left drive cage. I'm guessing that the configuration in the drive cages is something like this:

|5-6-7|8-0-0|

(where the farthest on the right labeled with 0s are unoccupied).

I originally replaced the drive in what I labeled slot 7, and it then claimed that both 6 and 7 had failed. Since the RAID array is made up of drives 5 through 8, I'm guessing that the above configuration is correct (it doesn't seem to make sense that 5 and 8 would be swapped).

The system is currently rebuilding the array and will continue to do so until tomorrow sometime.

The air conditioning went out around 2 AM this morning, and around 8 one of the drives on the CD server failed due to the heat. We have a replacement being shipped to us for delivery tomorrow.

The ambient temperature was about 95 this morning, and that cooked drive 6 on the CD server (farthest right drive in the left drive cage). A call to MDI tech support (1-800-228-0891) netted one replacement drive being express delivered to us. We should be able to swap the drive and have it rebuild by Friday.

The CD server is essentially in production.

It's still not on UPS power; that will have to wait until the UPS is upgraded. We're also still using a basic 5 port hub on the private net.

When loading CD images:

• In Share Manager: change the Volume Name to something distinct and reflective of the contents of the CD (see current images for general format).
• For Share Comment, use the format "", e.g.: "littejo 200302". The requestor is the person who requested the CD be loaded. Year and month are when the reqest was made.
• On PAX: mount the CD in a likely place (the CD volume label is a good directory name in most cases). Mount it read-only. Add it to /etc/fstab (via rcs.mgr).

Nice CD server. Pretty CD server. Documentation is a little sparse though.

In order to properly share a CD image via NFS from the CD server, you have to have the Mirror device finish "building". It takes over a day for the full RAID 5 of the four 180 Gb drives to finish building. Instead, I tested it with a single drive as a Mirror device, copied in a CD image, and it shares out to PAX without any problems.

I'm going to make some more tweaks, such as setting email drop locations and a few other things that require a reboot, and tell it to make the full RAID 5 mirror set. Then I'll let it sit for the weekend, and maybe it'll be happy by Monday.

"Ready for use in less than three minutes." My foot.

Oh, and is anyone else confused by this jumbling of "Mirror device" and "RAID"? The "Mirror device" is for mirroring the CD image onto the hard drive. It has nothing to do with RAID, except that the four hard drives are (well, will be) configured as a RAID set. Jeez.