Month: July 2020

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This little server is nice

Right at the moment it’s sitting on a shelf with a printer perched precariously over it.

It’s not going to stay in this position long but right now accessibility is more important than final location. Based on the temperature the thing runs at it may end up in the proper network closet. The drives currently in there run really hot when they’re in use.

For the time being, though, I’m putting it through its paces and moving all the undamaged data off the other drives to this machine.

Thus far, I’ve discovered a ton of damaged files, so this is more about recovering data than just transferring data.

After provisioning the 20TB raid was whittled down to about 16TB. Which is still way more than I had in the first place. I’ve been enabling features such as built in antivirus, media services, backups and a bunch of user tools. I’m probably only going to keep the things that actually get used. Right now I’m choosing things that I think are most likely to be used.

I gotta say the Backups are blindingly fast. Provided the speed holds up, I’ll probably retire the backups on the TimeCapsules and go just to the Synology, and a small Thunderbolt connected drive here on the desk. As nice as network backups are, I’ve learned not to put all my eggs in one basket. Losing data is a pain in the butt.

In all I’ve sacrificed about 3 days to data integrity and figuring out whats been damaged and what’s still viable. My thought is to leave the existing drives alone for the next month or two just in case there’s something that I’ve missed. But after that, I’m going to try to reformat them to see if it was the drive that died or just data corruption.

Depending on the results, I may retire the old drives to Archive Status. Just putting stuff on them that should have a redundant copy someplace.

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Good things about the Coronavirus Pandemic

Aside from the news media screaming, “Death and despair” 24/7, there may be some good to come out of all this.

It’s probably too soon… But hey, I could drop dead tomorrow!

1. Corporate America has been forced to admit that working from home is viable. Going forward perhaps they’ll go “Green” and keep workers, working from home.

2. People have realized that health care is important and perhaps they’ll force politicians to follow through with a better version of health care that is affordable for everyone that also doesn’t allow pricing to continue to spiral out of control. Why does the same drug cost $10 a pill here and .01 in a third world country? What’s the real damn cost? Big pharmaceutical giants I’m looking at you!

3. Everyone is seeing just how easily despotic rulers can rise and how difficult it is to regain rights once those rights are taken away. Governor Whitmer I’m looking at you! BTW thank you for showing in just a few short weeks, the arc of a despotic cycle. Now hopefully America will use your rise and fall as a lens through which all politicians will be viewed.

4. Traffic is, for the time being a thing of the past. Speeding tickets in LA are increasingly written for speeds in excess of 100 mph. Funny how that works isn’t it?

5. The air is cleaner. So obviously if there weren’t as many people forced to drive to and from work, air pollution wouldn’t be as much of a problem… Duh!

6. The oil companies have seen their future. Yep there will still be a demand for oil but not at obscene prices, and if we continue to work from home you might want to sell off your oil stocks.

7. Antisocial behavior is suddenly fashionable. Who could’ve seen that coming?

8. People have more time to actually learn about little things, like their kids, and their community, instead of running all the time like bats out of hell.

9. For once, the Government is actually giving tax dollars back. At the same time it’s learning that the American People aren’t pleased with their government and haven’t been for a long time.

10. The Government is learning that they can still be functional with a lot less people actively working. I guess Trump laying off and consolidating various departments wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

11. People are re-learning that common sense might actually be beneficial. Planning for disaster, washing your hands, staying away from others if you’re sick, not depending on the government to be your savior, etc.

12. We’ve seen our vulnerabilities laid bare. We can’t have the convenience of super cheap disposable products without being vulnerable to losing access to those products at a moment’s notice. It’s time to start bringing jobs and industry back to our shores and this time, let’s do it with thought. We don’t have to trash the country just because we have manufacturing here. We have the opportunity to build better factories and better manufacturing processes that are less (or not) damaging to the local environment.

13. Everyone may be realizing that unlimited immigration legal or otherwise might not be such a great idea. I’m going to be interested to see how that plays out going forward.

14. Censorship is most definitely alive and well in America. Folks are hopefully realizing that Facebook & Twitter are not the best places to get information. If humanity is really lucky both of those corporations will come to a crashing end. I’m even hopeful that all of the news media will get a rework and re-establish some journalistic integrity. Then they’ll be using their first amendment rights properly, by just reporting what happened instead of every piece being an Op/Ed.

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Lately things around the house have been breaking…

Most of the things have been plumbing related, which I hate.

The most recent breakdown came as a bit of a surprise. My primary NAS drive has decided to take a dump. 

We use this drive to serve up movies, and store important documents. It’s also used as a share point for things that I help the other half with, music, videos, web sites, etc.

I’ve been noticing little things lately when accessing the drive, but didn’t really think much about it. In retrospect the drive was telling me something was wrong.

As the issues and errors accumulated I started re-evaluating the entire storage method. After doing a lot of research, I’ve decided to go with a RAID array.

The unit i’ve settled on is relatively inexpensive, but seems to provide a lot of bang for the buck.

Configuring it will take some time and the unit may have a steep learning curve. The advantage is that I’ll have 16TB of storage when it’s fully configured and that storage provides 2 hot swappable drives.

That means that up to two drives could fail and the entire 16TB would still be recoverable.

My current situation is a single drive and I have no idea how much data I’ll be able to recover.

What I’m doing may be overkill but I’d like to not have to worry about it for the next 5 years.

I’m also leaning more toward doing gig work and having a ton of space to work with would be a big convenience.

I expect to be locked into some form of digital prison for at least the next week while I bring this puppy online.