dead file server
2012 March 29
As we’ve written about many times, we have a lot of automated data collection going on that includes but is not limited to:
allsky camera images
radiojove images and audio
solar radio telescope data
weather webcam
weather station
They all used to feed their data directly into a networked computer (the file server) inside the house. Then over the years, the bunnies ate the ethernet cable out to the observatory, not once but many times, etc,etc. we decided to reconfigure everything to store data on the local computer that the stuff was hooked into and send it to the file server at a later time.
This would help out against all kinds of outages and bunnies.
That design paid off again today as our 10? year old file server died. It was an old AMD Athlon 1.8GHz with 1gb ram. Dead motherboard. It died just after 04:01, for no readily apparent reason.
One of the things that I really like about linux was our ability to move the three hard drives out of the old box, into my newer (only 5 years old!) desktop (after removing it’s drive), powering up and presto chango, in less than 20 minutes, everything is up and running again.
No problems with a totally different motherboard, chipset, processor, drivers with all of the above, moving from a PCI SATA drive card to one on the motherboard… no problems at all.
This was linux fedora 15 and so far (a day later) everything is still running fine.