21Terrabytes of storage

Apparently it was a “good idea” to upgrade our storage capacity from the standard nas devices to a full on  raid 6 array containing 16x 1.5tb drives stored in a rack to protect our ever growing invaluable data.

Over the past week, me and Ben have been setting up our newly acquired areca 1680 and the drive array with the fedora 10 distro.

Our first attempt went as follows:

1. Ensure pci-e adapter from array is in a slot running at 8x = check motherboard
manual to ensure speed isn’t downgraded if running other cards (like ours was! - stupid Asus p5q deluxe)…

2. We installed the areca raid card driver onto fedora using the download links on their website, along with the archttp64 proxy so we could access and configure the card through a web browser.

3. Fedora recognised the raid array as an sdb which is the name it assigns scsi drives. We then tried formatting using cfdisk, but after trying to work out why it would not format past the second drive, we found that it does not support partitions greater then 2tb. Enter parted.

4. Using parted, we managed to get our partition tables as we wanted them, using these commands:

i. parted /dev/sdb

ii. mklabel - gpt

iii. mkpart - name - ext3 - 0TB - 21TB

We then used the print command to view our tables, which sure enough gave us the full 21Tb support.

5. We quit out of parted, and then ran mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1 (sdb1 was created by parted during mkpart) to format this partition.

6. We could then mount sdb1 using mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/bigdisk and then used vi /etc/fstab to mount this at start-up

This seemed to all be working fine, and had no issues with samba sharing the raid array with windows, and could read/write to it perfectly fine.

So we thought, cool this is working!

### [BAD IDEA AHEAD] ###

Next step, remove a drive in the hope it would detect this and attempt a rebuild… so we removed drive 6 from the array, turned it back on, and found that 2 drives were missing… 2!? Interesting…

Checking the error logs we had the missing drive - as to be expected, and a random drive (14) had timed out and didn’t boot. Our array was sitting there in degraded mode feeling rather sorry for itself. After a restart we still had 2 drives down, but this time 14 had spun up fine, but 8 had timed out… wonderful!

After a day fiddling, we decided to do a full raid rebuild to see if we could fix these timeout errors, to no avail.

A few support calls later, and a trip to Maplin for some floppies, we found ourselves with the WDtler utility, the Western Digital hard drive timeout adjuster thingymajig.

We generated a bootable dos floppy, copied over the wdtler utlity and the hdaccess exe which was “supposed” to detect our drives on the raid card, and booted up

Once in dos, we called: hdaccess, then  wdtler -r15 -w15…

… “no drives detected”… AAARG

I had the joyful task of pulling out each individual drive consecutively and plugging it directly to the motherboard, and run the utility that way, which thankfully worked.

Since then, we’ve recreated a raid 6 set, partitioned and formatted successfully, and written data to it with no timeouts or errors of any kind. YAY back to square one!

OK so, time for the break testing again! Turns the server off, *squints, squishes face up, pulls out drive 1, puts it down and runs away at a brisk pace*.

Upon return (and no nuclear disasters) we turned the array on, ran the proxy utility from a browser, and saw our raid was in “incomplete” state. Great, that’s to be expected, and we have no timeout errors!

So we manually put our array into degraded mode, inserted a blank drive, and to our dismay, it’s started to rebuild itself!

As I write this, its currently at 29.7% rebuilding, and its been about 2 hours. NO TIMEOUT ERRORS YET!!!

We shall see in the morning once it’s complete…

Autorun Flash content from a USB pen drive.

Here’s a quick guide to getting your flash content added to the autorun list under Windows (XP SP2 or later).

1. Publish your flash project to an exe (swfs should work as well).
2. Open up notepad and add this text:

[autorun]
open=myflash.exe
action=Run myFlash Application
icon=myIcon.ico

3. Rename “myFlash” in the above code to the name of your application. You can also create an icon file (.ico) to accompany your application (if you dont wish to, you can delete the “icon=myIcon.ico” line.

4. Go to File, SaveAs, and type in autorun.inf in the file name textfield, then click Save.

5. Copy your exe and the autorun.inf file to the root directory of your USB pen drive (along with your ico file if you chose to create one).

6. Next time you plug your USB pen drive into your computer, you will see your application added to programs launcher dialog box that appears.