I bought a Seagate 300G SATA drive from Fry's because it had a bitchin' rebate. I already had 2 SATA drives in giza attached to a Promise TX2, so I ordered a TX4 from newegg.com.

giza

Pentium 90. Originally a Dell mini, now the only original components are the chassis, the CPU, the RAM, and /dev/hda (1G). The motherboard was replaced when the battery sustaining the CMOS died. Numerous hard drive upgrades have been inflicted upon it. I have no clue where its CDROM is (on a shelf? in another machine?)

saqqara

AMD K6 300MHz. Assembled to my specs by MicroMenders. Had served as the house router after the death of cairo, but was eventually replaced in this role by a Linksys WRT54GS. At the beginning of this adventure it was merely the house DNS server and basement space heater.

Promise

  • Ultra33
  • TX2
  • TX4

Friday 2006-02-03

After having the boxes with the parts lying on my couch for a week or so, I finally performed surgery on Giza, the house file server. I couldn't get the new card to work. I couldn't even return it to its working original configuration.

The first symptom was that Linux would boot, but it couldn't access /dev/hde with any reliability. Eventually I got it into a state where it would freeze even before loading LILO.

My brother had just arrived in town, so I spent the whole weekend hanging out. Plus I hosted a Guitar Hero party on Saturday.

Tuesday 2006-02-07

I tried attaching the LVM and RAID drives to saqqara. I upgraded to a 2.4.32 kernel. saqqara lacked the proper LVM2 tools. I tried compiling the latest sources, but there were compile errors.

Wednesday 2006-02-08

I realized that giza could boot its core operating system without any of the LVM. I tested it with its two core drives and the Promise Ultra33 controller and it (mostly) worked. I disabled all the LVM and RAID because they referred to drives which were not installed.

I decided to try one last time to reattach the LVM and RAID drives to giza, but something about the TX2 and TX4 cards drive the machine insane, causing it to fail to get to the LILO stage. Perhaps the PCI on that ancient motherboard isn't recent enough. This does not explain why the TX2 card worked for months before.

I gave up on giza as a fileserver and transplanted the drives into saqqara. I had to build the 2.0.33 version of LVM.

Because I had at some point attached a single drive to giza, all the RAIDs were fractured. I assume some serial number got incremented on a single disk, and the disks that were not attached were deemed "failed". This meant I had to raidhotadd and reconstruct all the arrays. I used mdadm -E to check the UUIDs and figure out what partition pairs matched up.

I discovered that without the device mapper kernel patch, I could not bring any LVMs on-line. I applied a patch for the 2.4.26 kernel to my 2.4.32 source.

Thursday 2006-02-09

The device-mapper kernel is compiled. The RAIDs have completed their reconstruction.

I was getting an error while booting about "/dev/md0 is not raid0 or linear". It turns out the underlying raid devices were unavailable at that stage because the ulsata2 module had not yet been loaded. I had to tweak the rc.sysinit to modprobe ulsata2 before the vgscan.

Finally I have NFS back on-line. All that remains is tweaking all the autofs configurations throughout the house to point at saqqara instead of giza.

looking to the future

The 300G Seagate that caused me to begin this adventure is still not installed in any host. Saqqara's power supply is merely a 300W affair with all its power connectors committed. Despite the fact that the hard drives appear to be a mere 10-20 watts each, and I could buy converter/splitters, I'm probably going to buy a modern power supply in the 400W+ range with built-in SATA power connections.

There are also nowhere near enough mounting points for all these hard drives. I envision an external home-milled drive frame with cooling fans and wires coming out of saqqara (which hasn't had its cover closed in over a year anyway).

I don't really know what to do with giza. Maybe I'll upgrade it to gentoo and make it a DNS server and play with LDAP and Asterix.

What About Bob?