I’m not one for too much buzz love, but I gotta give Buzz props for 2 things:

1) allowing me to comment on things directly in the ui that notified me of the new content (I suppose facebook does this with their new reply-to feature, but it seems icky)
2) allowing me to cc people directly in my comment and have it show up in their inbox

Both features I’ve apparently gotten used to and miss when I’m using software that doesn’t have them.

Strangely in my head last Sunday morning:

It’s only taken me 4+ weeks, but the filer is finally upgraded. Here’s hoping my random iops doubles (along with significant gains in streaming writes). The real reason I did this was because the first raidz stripe was ~completely full (30G free — down to 9GB free after several resilverings). I think this effectively reduced my io to the single new stripe. Once this gets baked in for a bit (and I’ve had time to make some more backups), I’ll throw my 5x400G drives back into the array for even more space. :)

Before:

[root@filer0 tgarner]# zfs list tank
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
tank 3.96T 1.05T 52.7K /tank
[root@filer0 tgarner]# zpool list tank
NAME SIZE USED AVAIL CAP HEALTH ALTROOT
tank 6.37T 4.95T 1.41T 77% ONLINE -


After:

[root@filer0 ~]# zfs list tank
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
tank 3.98T 3.17T 51.1K /tank
[root@filer0 ~]# zpool list tank
NAME SIZE USED AVAIL CAP HEALTH ALTROOT
tank 9.09T 4.97T 4.12T 54% ONLINE -


Per Cole’s request:

I’m not exactly sure what happened (’cause it happened just last night), but I ~lost a whole bunch of data. Granted it was a scratch disk, and granted I have a backup from the middle of January, that’s not the point. So zfs has snapshots right? Well that’s what I have backups of, the snapshots. There were like 4 snapshots. I have perfect replicas of my first two snapshots. I even have perfect incremental snapshots between each. But I can’t seem to get my backup “take” the incrementals. That was part of the issue. Now yesterday, likely due this scratch drive going bad (not superbad, just retrying sector reads a lot), the box kernel paniced. I saw it just before I went to work. It rebooted and came up fine. I went to work. I’m pretty fed up with the filer not being in a perfect state of being, so I sit down after work to beat it into submission. First item on the agenda is getting a perfect copy of the scratch disk, or at least figuring out what my good backups are missing. Well, I can’t even read the darn thing. It says something about corrupt metadata. At this point I have very few options. Basically they amount to a `zfs export` and `zfs import`. And I’m pretty sure that once I export it, I won’t be able to get it back, ever again. So, feeling that I have no other recourse, I export, and guess what happens: I can’t re-import it. Well fooey. I basically take my lumps, have a decent backup from January, recover from elsewhere the data I know I am missing, and curse zfs for being so smart that I have like zero recourse to debug w/o begging Sun engineers on a mailing list of how to recover this drive. Since the o/s that I’m running is quite old, it is also possible that newer versions of OpenSolaris could be better about being able to import this disk. I tried to upgrade my install of Nexenta last night, to no avail. Neither dist-upgrade nor a fresh install worked for me. So I’m stuck for a bit. Maybe over the course of the next few months, I might be able to recover it. I’m going to try not to worry about it too much. It’s just a super pita that it’s such a huge black box. Even if I, say, wanted to ddrescue the whole disk, I have no idea how to import it into the os. And there are tools (like zdb, etc) that in theory you might be able to recover, but that’s all voodoo to me. Anyhoo, that’s the gist of it. I lost another 1TB disk the other week. I still haven’t put all of the 5 1TB disks that I bought some time ago in. Which is the main goal of this weekend. I got another disk at Microcenter. I did a replacement last night, so I have 3 more to go. Given that they take 6 or 8 hours (depending on how much data is on the stripe), and that i/o basically comes to a crawl when this is going on, it’s going to be a long weekend.

zfs and I are not on speaking terms right now…

I’ve started getting into a routine for most, but not things. A few things linger and haven’t yet become second nature. One of those things is eating on the weekend. Weekday meals are at work, so there is reduced choice when it comes the multitude of restaurants in the surrounding cities. Plus there’s usually a group and usually someone who will make a decision of which cafe to go to. In Atlanta, I got into a pretty decent weekend eating routine wherein I could keep my weight constant, while eating what I wanted and felt full. Maybe I just stumbled upon the right combination of chicken; I dunno. Anyway, it totally seems to me that I have fewer fast food places to choose from, or maybe that’s just my perception. I was pretty happy with my Chick-fil-a and my Zaxbys. :) My substitute here is Popeye’s. Man, this post is super rambly. If anyone has any suggestions for non-fattening restaurants other than the ones I plan to hit (In-n-Out, Popeye’s, Wendy’s, and Taco Bell), I’m all ears.

What do you mean the nearest Sonic is 30 minutes away?!?

At first I thought it was the cold, but now I’m thinking that I must be allergic to something out here. I wonder what my options are for a sore/scratchy throat…

I think my shredder’s on its last leg. I’ve done a crap-ton of paper, but I don’t recall it ever refusing to work. I’m thinking heat issues.

!@%$($)@_+!! it. If ever in the future I tray again to move myself please stop me. I’ve gone through 2 power supplies and now my video card doesn’t seem to want to cooperate. At this rate I’ll have a whole new computer within the month. :( All of these broken components were not in the budget. Thank goodness I had the (flippant) desire to put the filer and the tv in the truck. In hindsight I should have put my workstation in there as well. Putting it at the very back of the trailer where it would get the most sway, have the most room to move, and get the most scratched up was a bone-headed move. I suppose I should be thankful I didn’t lose any data, though I’m wondering now about the hard drive in the workstation, if it’s going to hold out or not. It’s had a good run, and smart checks out, but it has some smart checksum errors, which is troubling, along with some less than desirable sounds emanating from it. And of course both frys and microcenter were closed by the time I discovered the video problems. Thanks alot ups for delivering my package at like 8pm (12 hours after it was put on the truck).

</rant>