[OT] Merry Xmas?? not here, alas.. :

["Ian Lowe" <ian@xxxxxxx>]

Or, put another way, Highpoint strikes again...

I'm kicking myself around the place for letting my guard down, and
trusting a single shred of data to the *crap* that is highpoint: Jen
and I got home this morning at about 2am, all festive and cheery...

To find a dead server.. the main company server that stores all of
our documents, email etc... the one with no tape drive, as it's gone
faulty and we are waiting for HP to ship a replacement..

except, I haven't been too fussed with the HP delays, because I
rebuilt the server in September to use 4 160Gb disks in a Raid 5
set... I have a great track record with Raid5: on Compaq Proliants, I
didn't lose a single byte, despite some nasty failures...

However, it's now abundantly clear that the Rocket"RAID" Card has
more in common with a tin of wasp repellent than with any decent
implementation of RAID.

It seems that about 10pm one of the four disks in the stripe failed
(or had a minor wobblie to itself: it seems to test okay now), and
rather than doing the raid-5 thing of continuing to run with reduced
performance, the RocketRaid card decided to choke.. and didn't cause
RedHat to crash, oh no: it instead allowed the operating system to
think it was writing new email, log entries etc...

...and over the following 4 hours or so, wrote random garbage all
over the ext3 filesystem on the disk, causing absolutely massive
corruption. I have had about an hours sleep, and am now (after much
twiddling) about a tenth of the way through an efs2ck which is either
doing a brave job of trying to rebuild what remains of the
filesystem, or is arbitrarily deleting all of my company records,
scanned documents and personal photographs...

And thanks to the ongoing tape drive problem, my most recent
"proper"
backup (apart from the odd laptop copy of bits of data) is september.

Right about now, I'm looking around for someone to tell me I'm on
Scare Tactics...

The real reason for this post (apart from trawling for sympathy or
offers of assisted suicide) is to warn again: Highpoint = Data Death.
I said it before, and now I'm suffering for ignoring my own warning
and thinking that good reviews and the passing of time would change
things..

I have now suffered data loss from HighPoint Based systems three
times... I have to live with kicking myself for being a confirmed
moron, I just hope that someone takes this as a warning, and avoids
the pain.

DON'T TRUST *ANY* HIGHPOINT BASED DEVICE WITH DATA YOU ARE NOT
PREPARED TO LOSE.

Ian "ho ho ho" Lowe.



UKHA 2004: 15th and 16th May 2004
EARLY BIRD RATE EXPIRES 31/12/03!
http://www.ukha2004.com

http://www.automatedhome.co.uk
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