As sometimes happens with new equipment, it fails… Even to the best equipment. This wasn’t a drive you’d buy at the local office supply or big box electrnics store. This was one of the 4 Western Digital Enterprise class RAID Edition 2 (RE2) drives that failed shortly after being placed in the rack and left to burn in… This is exactly why we let servers sit for a while before using them. No customer data had been placed on the server. Our own website was placed there for a short while, but when the node experienced problems we moved it back to the other server – giving us some real world experience in a problem situation live migration.

After working with it a bit and determining the drive itself was at fault a replacement drive was ordered. The existing drive will be swapped out under WD’s warranty terms. While the node is operational, with no RAID mirror protecting the data, we chose to not place any customers onto the server. So for the time being XEN is not available as an option when ordering a VPS. If you really want XEN and need to sign up today, we can temporarily place you on an OpenVZ node in the same d.c. Once the server is back to a trusted state, we’ll migrate your vps over to the server – but this will result in a small downtime during the migration.

The replacement drive is in FedEx’s hands, and we expect the drive to be delivered tomorow. After it’s in, the drives sync’ed (up to 24 hours), and stress tested, we expect the server to be available for use by the coming weekend.

Edit 6/3:  The new drive did in fact arrive today and was the defective replaced. The controller is in the process of rebuilding the array as I type this. Once it is done, I’ll start a process of stressing the drives just to be confident in them before opening the server up to customers… We wouldn’t have normally been as relaxed in the replacement process. But since no customers sites are hosted on the server, we thought it better to take the time and be sure it’s 100% up to the job for which it’s designed.

Robert

Robert Porter is the founder and managing member of Lagniappe Internet LLC. Robert holds multiple certifications incluging Oracle Certified Professional-Java 6 SE (OCP-J6), MCSE, A+, Net+, Project+, Security+, and multiple CIW certifications. He has been in the hosting industry for more than a decade and is founded Lagniappe Internet L.L.C. as a privately owned, completely debt free, hosting company based out of New Orleans. Robert's background includes 25+ years in programming, databases, networking and systems administration.

Categories: System Messages