[NCLUG] Failing drive or controller...

[Benson Chow]

It's not enough information from just seeing a sector or so fail to 
pinpoint whether it's a dying harddrive or controller.  Plus 
the fact that recent IDE controllers have some intelligence on-disk that 
the drive itself has part of the controller.  But usually it is the disk 
module that failed though -- if you never had any disk failures before, 
here's a good rule of thumb - blame the disks first.

There appears to be two errors in that screen shot - thermal recalibration 
failed and timeout while read sector.  While something as silly as the 
hard drive getting suddenly disconnected could possibly cause both, having 
a disk that went badly out of alignment and triggerred the disk's onboard 
microcontroller to give up is the more likely scenario.

Either way, regardless if it's the drive or the onboard controller, it's 
likely time to have someone visit the sick machine and someone who's 
authorized to visit the machine at FRII is the only real answer :-( What's 
the colo contract say about dying machines - and do you have someone 
locally authorized to visit the machine?

(For this type of situation where I'm far away from my box and must need 
high uptime I'd probably have set up the machine with some sort of hot- or 
cold- swappable RAID system that can automatically figure out and rebuild 
any replaced redundancy... and have someone who does not need to know 
anything about the system that could replace disks available...)

-bc

On Fri, 15 Dec 2006, jeff wrote:

> s/Linux/Free Software   :)
>
> I have an OpenBSD firewall which appears to have a failing drive or IDE 
> controller. It is still passing packets fine and has been for days, but I 
> can't log in via console (KVM over IP) or ssh.
>
> A gory snapshot:
> http://jebba.blagblagblag.org/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/ahimsa-fw2-20061215.png
>
> Here's the real kicker: I'm 6,000+ miles away from this box at the moment... 
> The box is co-located @ FRII.
>
> Any folks on this list who are reasonably fluent in OpenBSD that can help? 
> Poke me on or offlist. :)