Uncategorized admin on 27 Jan 2002 08:00 am
Eggs(all) –> Baskets(4)
[Ladies and Gentlemen this is your pilot speaking: we are currently cruising at an altitude of 35,000 feet at speeds upwards of 600 megabytes per minute. We have just passed 190 gigs and should arrive at our destination (196 gigs) at approximately 8:15pm EST. Thank you for flying"Veritas Sucks"Airlines.]
It seems like it was only 11 hours ago that I got out of bed and connected to work via VPN for a nice-n-simple"fsck -o full"on our E220 RAID, and now it will be only a few more minutes before my complete fucking data restore is completed.
But I’m not bitter. Oh wait a minute, yes I am.
The whole RAID got toasted this time while trying to fix some residual damage from last week’s Happy Fun Veritas Play Time."Take the system down and do an fsck,"they said."All will be well with the world, you betcha by golly,”they said.
So we do an fsck and eventually grow weary of whacking"y"to clear hundreds of bad inodes and give it the old"fsck -y"treatment. That was, apparently, a bad idea, according to the Veritas tech o’ the day.
Our fsck failed with this error:
vxfs fsck: rgetblk bad request, bno = 17039621, sz = -2145361920
file system check failure, aborting …That means, effectively,"Have a nice day, reformat."(Or, alternately, that the tech o’ the day gave up pretty easily when I said I had a fresh backup I could restore from.)
It would be perfectly peachy with me if the volume had giant holes in it but was still mountable, but no such luck. Let’s just pitch 196 gigs worth of data into the bit bucket and start over.
Not trusting Veritas one iota, after last week, I had mirrored all the data to our old server before taking the system down. The full system backup had also just completed, and there’s even an additional backup the users do manually.
So redundancy (paranoia) saves the day. Veritas does not save the day, yet again.
Is Veritas Foundation Suite a giant pile of crap or am I just lucky? What do the poor bastards with only one server do?
I am getting to be quite the wiz with rsync though, so that’s something.