Bah, hardware seems to hate me. I spent, literally, all weekend fixing my latest batch of issues. Ever since I’ve gotten the computers up and going at the house my webserver has had these odd random freezes. Late last week I figured that it seemed to be one of the SATA harddrives that houses the RAID 1 partition that housed all my digital pictures and my software backups. Ok I says, I can deal with this. A bit of testing later and there were more problems. One drive had some sort of hardware error related to a file somewhere deep in the pictures hierarchy, but the filesystem was still there and I could mount it and access all the files on it. However, the other drive, which didn’t seem to have any hardware issues, somehow had the filesystem nuked. Not sure how that happened, but there were a couple of power failures as people worked on the power, so something must have gotten screwed up.
Of course, because of the hardware error, when the RAID tried to rebuild itself, it’d fail when it hits the bad bit on the harddrive.
So I spent a lot of the weekend moving files around to other systems, filling up firefly’s computer with all my images and files. When that was finally over, on a whim I downloaded PowerMax from Maxtor as I thought it might be needed for warrenty work or something. I ran the quick test and it came back and told me to run the advanced test. I did and it told me that it had problems and it could try to fix it. Ok, why not, nothing to lose.
After a rebuild and a few tests, all was well. No files even seemed to have any problems, so yay.
Then late last night, after the trickertreaters were gone suddenly my Firecard decided to freeze up and stop responding suddenly. It took a couple resets and then it’d be ok for a bit, then freeze up again. It seemed like it had something to do with lots of text being transferred through it or something. Left it overnight and it was ok this morning, so fingers crossed. However, I am going to be digging through my spare parts for another network card just in case I need to convert my webserver to a firewall.