On 3/23/11 12:51 PM, Alan Brown wrote:
> Mehma Sarja wrote:
>> Since drives ONLY fail on Friday afternoons local time, an effective
>> remedy is to check for SMART messages before the weekend. Foolish as
>> that is, I am surprised how many times it has held true for me.
> For similar reasons we only perform work on critical infrastructure on
> tuesday (or thursday if a followup is needed).
>
> Mondays are for picking up any pieces from the weekend and Fridays are
> best left alone.
>
> Equipment tends to fail the evening or day after it was last worked on...

Worst case scenario: A number of years ago, I had a critical central proxy 
server whose drive failed 
on Christmas Day. Okay, campus was closed and everyone was on vacation, but 
lots of people doing 
research from home could not access resources. I had no replacement drive on 
hand. I had to recover 
onto a completely different machine, set up the proxy services, change DNS 
entries to point to it, 
set up virtual interfaces for the proxy connections, etc. Spent the better part 
of Christmas Day and 
evening alone in the server room sweating out the details, after I had tracked 
down the cause of the 
difficulties.

After that, I convinced management to pay for mirrored drives.

-- 
---------------

Chris Hoogendyk

-
    O__  ---- Systems Administrator
   c/ /'_ --- Biology&  Geology Departments
  (*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center
~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst

<hoogendyk AT bio.umass DOT edu>

---------------

Erdös 4



------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Enable your software for Intel(R) Active Management Technology to meet the
growing manageability and security demands of your customers. Businesses
are taking advantage of Intel(R) vPro (TM) technology - will your software 
be a part of the solution? Download the Intel(R) Manageability Checker 
today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-dev2devmar
_______________________________________________
Bacula-users mailing list
Bacula-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users