OK, so I’ve got a server at the house that is a live server on the Internet. I use it as a mail, web, ssh, imap, and authoritative DNS server for my domain xsintricity.com. It uses a raid5 array for the filesystem to protect it from hard disk crashes and the like. Well, the basis of a raid5 array is that if any single disk fails, the other disks are able to continue in degraded mode without loosing any data. About 1 1/2 weeks ago, one of the disks started failing. Completely. Normally, this wouldn’t be any big deal, but prior to this, the machine had started exhibiting a different problem as well. Namely, once in a while, one of the disks would get kicked out of the array due to a temporary error condition. I could always add the disk back into the array, have the system reupdate it to current, and things would go on working just fine until the next disk got kicked out. Well, now that a disk it out of the array all the time, that second disk failure makes the machine panic every time the occasional kick happens. Recently, that’s been every morning :-(

So, I’ve got a new hard drive on the way. Should be here tomorrow. Once that’s here, I’ll rebuild the entire filesystem on the new disk, kill off all the questionable disks (I got one disk that’s big enough to hold all the data in the array) and hopefully my problems will be solved. We’ll see…