Seems like Farragut’s HD is going to say “bye bye” soon:
ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA status=59 error=40 LBA=35000919
g_vfs_done():ad0s1a[READ(offset=17920438272, length=2048)]error = 5
ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA status=59 error=40 LBA=35000919
g_vfs_done():ad0s1a[READ(offset=17920438272, length=2048)]error = 5
ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA status=59 error=40 LBA=35000919
g_vfs_done():ad0s1a[READ(offset=17920438272, length=2048)]error = 5
ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA status=59 error=40 LBA=35000919
g_vfs_done():ad0s1a[READ(offset=17920438272, length=2048)]error = 5
ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA status=59 error=40 LBA=35000919
g_vfs_done():ad0s1a[READ(offset=17920438272, length=2048)]error = 5
I’m not sure how much will it last before being unusable; I’ll see to tighten up my backup strategies, to avoid losing data, but I’m expecting a bad adventure in the future.
Now, to change the Hard Drive is not so easy, the minimal size I can find is 250GB for €70, but the disk usage does not really call for such a size:
/dev/ad0s1a 18G 2.0G 15G 12% /
An option could be to use compactflash for storing the whole system, the problem is that it’s far from inexpensive: a 4GB compactflash card costs about €50, an already IDE-capable flash drive costs about the same, plus the price of an average CF-to-IDE adapter.
I’m not sure on what to do, especially with what I’ve been writing about lately, I’m not sure if it’s worth spending more money to get Farragut back up. Maybe I should just stop blogging and close everything down… and migrate the GIT repositories somewhere else.
I still have some 18G SCSI drives here that I don’t need anymore.If you’re interested, contact my via mail.Regards, Elias P.
Oups, sry… forgot to leave my mail: mail@eliasprobst.euRegards, Elias P.
Compact flash would not be the best since it degrades the more it is written to.Personal servers are a great help when you have more than one computer as well. With the large SATA drive you can use it as NAS and backup.
Thank you very much Elias, unfortunately Farragut is a really minimal box, and I don’t have SCSI support in any of my boxes, so I don’t think that will help too much.Kevin, I know compact flash degrades with time, but it’s still better than nothing; after all the only things that get written to that box, beside software updates, are blog updates to PostgreSQL, GIT pushes and AwStats databases, the rest is mostly static (rbot and lighttpd logs, but I rarely need anything else but the current log from them anyway, so I could run them in memory if I needed).And about using it as a fileserver once a big disk is on it, well, the current file server is Enterprise, which has 2×250 GB hard drives, I don’t feel the need to make Farragut one too, plus I’d like to keep the actual server exposed to the net (Farragut) not providing any function to the rest of the network. It could as well be in a DMZ for what I’m concerned, the only service it takes out of the rest of the network is NFS sharing of the portage repository (and a couple more) and backups pushes to my main box (which I was planning to move to a CF reader on Farragut one day, those cards are pretty nice to write backups to).
I think you aren’t in the US, so this doesn’t directly apply, but 250 gig low-end IDE seems way screwy.Pricewatch.com has SATA 40 gig from $32 (including shipping to US), and UltraATA 40 gig from $30.What about booting from USB or the like? International shipping economics are likely to be better on these, so you may even be able to get them from someplace listed on pricewatch. 4 gig USB flash drives from $33 (and I see that one says Int’l orders OK, tho you’ll pay a bit for shipping).Or boot from CD/DVD, and as you mentioned, use Enterprise for your data server over the network. CD ROM drives are cheap now days, especially if you already have a burner.I’ve no idea what a European equivalent of pricewatch.com might be, but it’s worth looking around for one, certainly if the low-end hard drives you can find now are 250 gig and Euro 70 (which I’d guess at ~$100 US, a quick google says I’m not far off, $93.25 by xe.com‘s converter).Or visit a local used computer store or recycler.Good luck finding something, in any case! Your blog’s often quite informative and I’d hate to lose out on reading it.
Most of HDD manufacturers are American, if I recall correctly, that would explain why they still sell cheap drives there, I can’t find anything smaller than 80GB (Maxtor, which I’ll never buy again in my life), and in some shops nothing smaller than 250GB.Booting from USB is not really a good option: beside having only two 1.1 USB ports, and being occupied by the two UPSes, USB is also quite slow even in its 2.0 version, and I do need a decently fast access to the data on disk for the blog, and still is flash data, so it’s still a bit of a problem.Leaving Enterprise up to leave farragut to serve for it is not an option either, it’s quite noisy so I shut it down during the night, and at that point I’d just have Enterprise providing the blog.Anyway, I’ll try to continue doing my best to keep the blog alive; I’ve moved the google ad from the sidebar to the top (which I don’t like myself :/) to see if that can get me the money to buy a new SATA controller.. it might cost me less, and I have a 160GB SATA spare disk.