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That feeling of dread

I’m watching TV this past Sunday, streaming TV shows from my networked hard drive (a Buffalo Terrastation) to my Netgear EVA as my DirecTV is still out. I had noticed that when I hit play, it was taking a much longer time to start the show, but they started, and then halfway through one show it stopped, and couldn’t connect.

Walking into my office, all the lights on the Terrastation are flashing. The web interface came up, and the diagnostics report that one of the hard drives has failed.

Ack. Ugh. Many bad words I don’t want my children repeating.

A feeling of dread. Panic setting in – what isn’t backed up? What am I going to lose? What will my wife think?

I run some more diagnostics, generic drive failure messages. The Terrastation won’t give me status on the raid array because of the drive failure. Why, oh why was I running in drive spanning mode and not in a raid configuration where if a drive failed I’d still be ok?

The Terrastation has 4 160GB drives with the option of drive spanning, RAID 0, 1 or 5. Running a small version of Linux, which I always meant to hack with a custom firmware but never did for SSH access, it has FTP and Samba. I had Samba shares set up storing all my music, photos, videos and backup shares for both my wife and me. The Terrastation streams that content to my Netgear EVA at my home theater, the Sonos music players all over the house, and the hacked Xbox in the family room.

The lost data appears to be minimal – I have a full backup of my music on my desktop’s hard drive, and it looks like I have a copy of most of the photo’s, though I need to double check. Ironically, I lost most of the video’s I’ve downloaded since my DirecTV dish has been down, but that is what Bittorrent is for.

I’m not sure what was in the backup directories, I know I haven’t backed up much lately.

Now the question is – when is redundant backup not redundant enough? Do I want to take one of the extra computers I’m not using and install FreeNAS or Openfiler? My good friend Mr. Holzer recently built a FreeNAS server using compactflash to boot the OS with a bunch of hard drives. The price of external drives keeps falling as well, do I want to just be lazy and buy another one of those?

I hate that feeling of dread – I’ve lost my personal music collection and had to re-rip it at least 3 times now. I know hard drives don’t last forever, and I’d rather be safe than sorry.

Foresight Linux Newsletter Released

Issue 6 (Aug 2007) of the Foresight Linux Newsletter has been released. This month’s issue features an update on the Foresight Linux 2.0 development and release dates, upcoming speaking engagements by members of the Foresight Linux team, and an introduction and overview to PackageKit.

This month’s newsletter is available at http://wiki.foresightlinux.com/confluence/display/newsletter/2007/09/01/ or you can subscribe in your favorite feedreader such as Liferea, Bloglines or Google Reader by adding http://feeds.feedburner.com/foresightnewsletter to your feedreader.

Where'd who go?

I haven’t blogged much in August, and here it is at month end already. Things should be settling down soon (I hope) leaving me more to blog and get back to work on Foresight.

I had a couple trips in August, lots of stuff going on at work, and we’re looking at building a new house, so the month just flew by.

The storm two days ago knocked my DirecTV dish out of alignment – not having TV for a week should free up some time. More on that later, but at least I have HD off air so I can watch the (7th ranked!) Badgers kick off the the college football season tomorrow.

I’m also in the process of transferring all my websites to a new server, so that’s eaten up some time. I spent almost a weekend working on getting apatheia.org moved from my account to a friends who is paying for it now.

More to come soon.

Planning for the inevitable

There is a small chance my website might temporarily go offline for the next week or two. I’ve been working with Site5 to transfer servers and downgrade my services, but communication has been spotty. Unfortunately, my account is technically up this week, and as luck would have it, I will be traveling when that occurs.

If that happens, and my account isn’t extended, I won’t be able to deal with it as I’m traveling for work later in the work. And then I will be very unhappy.

Cross your fingers!