SMC Server Crashed

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Keith.....Many thanks to you, Aaron and the rest of the staff that keeps this place flowing!

[Boyd Gathwright]

Boyd, the SMC server is running what is called an "array" based on Keith's post...which is multiple drives with the information spread across them and the ability to rebuild automatically if a single drive in the array fails. It's very different than your PC which only records a file on a single drive at one time.
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Keith, it must have been failing for the past couple of days...my response was really bad including the need to request a page multiple times. 'Glad you had the parts available!

Hi Jim,

.... What you have said is correct. Depending on the degree of safety and/or piece of mind, which only Keith can ascertain, I made this suggestion to him. The suggestion will work with an array and more but NOT automatically. It must be manually initiated and concluded. This could be considered time consuming and could and most likely will incur additional cost but it would offer a margin of safety. So, it depends on the degree, cost and convenience Keith is willing to consider.


Boyd

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[Keith Outten]

Boyd,

Generally Aaron will create a tar file on the servers drive as an SMC backup, we then copy the file from the servers hard drive to a remote network drive on our LAN. Shortly I will be installing a DVD burner so we can store an offsite copy of SMC for safekeeping. Unfortunately the process isn't automated but I hope we will be able to find the time to do so very soon.

Jim,

Last night we noticed a slowdown but we couldn't determine that it was server related as it also involved a portion of the Net. There must have been some kind of network problem somewhere down the pike as I noticed several web sites I visited were horribly slow. Aaron was here in the shop installing drivers for a dye-sub printer last night and we discussed the network slowdown issue. Shortly after he left the SMC server went down, it must have been about midnight EST. The motherboard was fried, we couldn't get any video response this morning which made diagnosing the problem more difficult, hence the amount of time SMC was offline this morning. We had to start swapping parts in and out of another machine to identify the problem.

[Bruce Shiverdecker]

As usual, YOU FOLKS went above and beyond.

Thanks.

Bruce

[Chris Gregory]

Kieth,

You may also want to take a a look at www.freedom9.com they have a very slick nas solution which is scaleable up to 1.6 TB one of the nicer features besides the very competitive pricing is that should you lose your HD's you can boot directly from the NAS which also includes DHCP server id needed. If I can help at all just drop me a line.

Chris