[ucc-announce] UCC /home restored

[James Andrewartha]

If you're reading this, you'll know that /home has been restored and mail
service resumed. The backup of /home made on Friday night has been
restored. Additionally, we were able to resuce some files modified after
the backup was made, and these can be found in
mussel:/space/morwong-salvage/home - be sure to check under home/mail for
your mail spool (although all you'll probably find is more unisfa list
rantage).

What happened was that after the upgrade to morwong on Saturday, on of the
disks in a RAID 1 set was not detected by morwong for some reason (a dud
slot or something). However, since it was 11pm by this time I said I'd fix
it the next day, which of course I didn't. Early Wednesday morning, the
other half of that RAID 1 set dies a horrible death and so /home goes
spang. After diagnosing the problem, I set about configuring the
replacement disks for morwong and trying to salvage as much data as
possible. Unfortunately the salvage utility coredumps (even though we have
the patch that supposedly stops that installed) so users after jaym won't
have gotten anything back from their homedirs. This afternoon we gave up
on salvaging any more and started copying /home back from backup, which
took longer than I expected, completing just after midnight tonight. As a
side benefit, morwong is now about 8.5GB larger, but that's not an excuse
to bloat your homedirs. We will also start using the DLT drive to do daily
backups. If there's any problems, email tech@ucc and we'll look into it.

Moral of the story: disks will pick exactly the worst time to fail and
punish you for being lazy and not fixing things.


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