With many of my friends changing over to iPhones, getting together for lunch, dinner or whatever else invariably turns into an iPhone orgy with each of us flaunting new apps, new tips on using them, taking caller id photos of each other, you name it. But it’s FUN. Speaking of fun, several folks from church are Twittering now so our connected little community is starting to grow. Pretty soon I’m sure we’ll be Twittering about going out to dinner somewhere or to a movie and have some other folks nearby come and join that are looking for something to do. How cool is that?

Now then, the practical application of geekiness. I’ve been working on a problem with my Apple XServe at the office. One of the data drives failed 2 weeks ago and it’s been a long arduous process getting things going again. Truth be told, I’ve been meaning to do some upgrades to the system and how it was configured - now with a service window at hand, it was time to get things back to tip top shape. First, I wanted to change how my drives were set up. In my old configuration, I had 3 - 250gb drives. I drive was my boot drive that I put the operating system and server applications on. The other two I striped together as a RAID 0 volume that was 500gb in size. That wasn’t such a good idea but you live and learn. A problem with either of the two would cause a loss of data on both. Now, I *DO* back the data drives up to tape every Monday, Wednesday and Friday evening so I’ve got that part covered. The caveat is restoring data - it takes awhile to move 400gb+ from tape to hard drives. At first, I thought I wanted to go with having a boot drive and then the two remaining drives as a RAID 1 set. This way, data is mirrored on the two drive and losing one or the other wouldn’t impact things. Another identical complete set of files would be avaialble on the non-failing drive. Problem here is now my data drive will only be 250gb instead of 500gb. I could get bigger drives but there’s an issue with the max drive size supported by the firmware on the server that I didn’t want to fool with.

Ultimately, I am going with a RAID 5 setup using all 3 drives. This way, I can lose any 1 of the 3 drives and all the data will be there but performance will be degraded. I simply replace the failed drive and the server automatically starts rebuilding the data. Also, I have more room! I set up a 20gb logical drive to put the OS and server applications on and then another logical drive around 450gb in size for data. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The original hard drives were Hitachi DeskStars (or DeathStars). Since those guys have been spinning 24/7 since 2004, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to go ahead and replace them with drives being so cheap nowdays. Got some Seagate Barracuda ES drives. Long story made VERY short. The server and those drives didn’t play well together. In the interim, I discovered that the servers built-in CD-ROM drive wouldn’t read CD’s… I needed that so I could boot from CD to set up my RAID card and install server software from. GAH!!! I called around to some Apple repair shops for a replacement CD-ROM drive and got prices from $120 to $150 and up for the part. GAH!!! There’s no 24X CD-ROM worth THAT in this day and age. I slid the server out of the rack and looked at the drive. I got the part number and manufacturer off it then did some Googling. I bought TWO of the CD-ROM drives I needed BRAND NEW for… $3.99 each. They arrived today. I put one in and voila! It workee workee.

Back to my Seagates now. The server would only intermittently recognize them. NOT GOOD. I went back over to my buddy’s shop (he ordered the Seagates for me) and told him my latest predicament. He let me have three Maxtor drives to try. I swapped out the drives. BINGO! They are working like a champ.

Finally, I was able to configure the RAID controller and get the drives all set up. I’ve got OSX loaded as well as all the zillions of updates from Apple installed. I’ve got the latest version of Retrospect installed too - that’s my backup program.

Things were going too smoothly now. So… as if on queue, my next issue is that the catalog files for my backups (they have a list of what’s on the backup tapes) aren’t being recognized as catalog files by Retrospect now. I copied the catalog files from the old server to my Mac Book and also to my Dell laptop. For some reason, the server thinks the catalogs are UNIX executable files. Grrrr…. I’ve got to figure out how to heal what looks to be some sort of file association horkage.

I haven’t had to have my I.T. hat on so tightly since my Intergraph days.