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OpenBSD CVS RAID Array Failing, Needs Replacement

Sam writes "The OpenBSD cvs server has a failing RAID array. Users of the projects on that array: OpenBSD, OpenSSH, OpenBGPD, OpenNTPD, and the upcoming OpenCVS are all invited to contribute towards the $12,500 cost of a suitably high-spec replacement. OpenBSD Journal article, and original request (thread)."

32 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. Gee.. by brilinux · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I guess that it is a good thing that I decided to spend all day today compiling NetBSD instead of OpenBSD ... but, those projects are somewhat important, especially OpenSSH; if I were not a poor college student, I would contribute. Good luck.

    1. Re:Gee.. by Noksagt · · Score: 5, Insightful
      if I were not a poor college student, I would contribute.
      Philanthropy does not require you to be personally wealthy. For one, a small donation from you of $5 will almost certainly help them & not overly burden you. But, as a student, you are in a good position to actually fundraise for them as well. Not only can you encourage your peers to also donate $5, but you can solicit faculty, alumni, and departments to donate much more than $5.

      OpenBSD also accepts hardware donations. You can send any spare equipment you have, encourage others to do the same, and/or even dumpster dive for perfectly working components that could use a new home.
  2. OpenBSD's RAID is Dying by NitsujTPU · · Score: 5, Funny

    It is official; Netcraft confirms: OpenBSD's RAID is dying

    One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered OpenBSD community when IDC confirmed that the OpenBSD RAID has failed again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent properly operating. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that OpenBSD's raid has lost more sectors, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. OpenBSD's RAID is collapsing into complete Redundant Disarray of Inexpensive Disks, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

    You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict OpenBSD's RAID's future. The hand writing is on the wall: OpenBSD's RAID faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for OpenBSD's RAID because OpenBSD's RAID is dying. Things are looking very bad for OpenBSD's RAID. As many of us are already aware, OpenBSD's RAID continues to data. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

    Fact: OpenBSD's RAID is dying

  3. Re:$12,500... what is this, MAC hardware? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think it's because they want quality equipment with a service contract. Your RAID enclosure built of duct tape and popsicle sticks fails to amuse.

  4. Link to make a donation by abradsn · · Score: 2, Insightful

    How do we actually make a donation?

    1. Re:Link to make a donation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      If you want to keep high-quality contributions to OpenBSD, donate to paypal@NetBSD.org. :*)

  5. Re:$12,500... what is this, MAC hardware? by Noksagt · · Score: 4, Informative
    From TFA:
    The price of a fully populated PowerVault 220S with 4 hour on-site warranty is
    about $12500 USD including tax and shipping. Let me kick this off by donating
    $250 to this cause. A person that shall not be named donated a PERC4/DC RAID
    controller.
  6. Expensive by BoomerSooner · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It would seem to me they could build one for significantly less. Dell's 4 hour service isn't as fast as having spare parts on-hand and swapping them yourself (someone has to be there to let Dell in so why can't they pull a harddrive sled and slide in a new one?). Plus the savings by building it themselves would more than cover the price of spare harddrives/controllers, etc...

    That is just my experience. Dell's service/support is pretty good but I've had a significantly higher rate of failure on their hardware compared to purchasing components individually.

    1. Re:Expensive by Kalak · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The cost of a spare backplane for the enclosure on this level of equipment is more than a few dollars. We're not just talking having a spare power supply and drives here. 4 hour service is a deal breaker when dealing with highly critical equipment of this level. No amount of spare parts, short of complete redundancy in equipment (another $12k) would be enough to cover every contingency. It's one reason our shop is not going to get an XRAID form Apple - good price point, but our critical infrastructure needs more than next business day response and some "common" spare parts. We're planning on even buying the redundant RAID array as well. Good Sysadmins are supposed to be paranoid and ready to face major disaster with excitement, and to plan for that disaster that should never occurr.

      --
      I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by .hack)
    2. Re:Expensive by 0xdeaddead · · Score: 2, Informative
      Wow I need to frame that quote some where Dell's support is TERRIBLE. Bottom line here is the scoop. If you want to buy servers on the cheap buy EXTRA ones. the 4 hour support thing is a sham. Every time Ive had to call them on it, they have had to fly people & equipment, or just make up the damedest lies on why they cannot deliver equipment in 48 hours (on the 4 hour support contract none the less).

      The last time they got me (6 days ago) we lost 1 terrabyte of their 'nas' storage... The joke was the 1st 24 hour delay on the 4 hour response was the lack of 250Gig IDE DISKS.....

      Then they send out the Unisys guy to get the box to boot, because it just crashes, and lo-and behold, he cant get it to work either.

      Now its going to be 12 DAYS to fix the box, and they have no spares. Nice 4 hour response guys!

      After 48 hours of this outage I managed to beat them into shipping a 6600 with 1.2Tb of space so I can restore peoples home directories & profiles so they can login again.. wow thanks.

      Bottom line is that they suck, and you get what you pay for. Its probably better to buy Compaq/HP on ebay & re-warentee it.

    3. Re:Expensive by OrangeSpyderMan · · Score: 4, Informative

      I agree. At one point Dell sold the company I work for some servers that would be clustered and hooked up to SAN's the world over. They sold us "gold" maintenance, knowing fine well where each and every cluster would be located, because we told them, and they even factored that in to the overall quote. This isn't some little deal for a couple of tens of thousands of dollars, this is a 80,000+ users worldwide, who would all be moving from HP desktops and servers to Dell, for the Wintel stuff. Now guess what nearly blew the deal? One of the locations that was destined to receive a Dell cluster was not supported for 2-3 days a week because their support engineer organised deep-dea fishing trips!!! He was the Dell engineer, and they came within a hair's breadth of blowing this as they furiously scrambled for engineer cover in $LOCATION. I wouldn't give Dell ANY money for service over their default baseline, as they may know how to ship boxes, they don't know jack shit about service.

      --
      Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
  7. Donation Method from TFA by Noksagt · · Score: 3, Informative

    "If you want to help, paypal some money to slash at peereboom dot us, or you can use the OpenBSD ordering system. Be sure to mention its for the cvs machine."

  8. question for you guys. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    What does the 'i' stand for in RAID?

    Thanks.

  9. Current Configuration & Need to Upgrade by Noksagt · · Score: 4, Informative
    From this post:
    The current raid array is using 14 U160 drives in a dual raid5
    configuration with a couple of hot spares. It is time to build up.
    See, the actual cvs machine is just a p3/gig machine. While there are
    lots of much faster build machines on the network, there has been no
    reason to crank the processor on cvs. It is not cpu bound but
    *strictly* IO bound. And the raid configuration has been working very
    well to keep that IO load under control, well it has been kind of
    working.

    We support more architectures, which means more NFS load is being
    generated. There are more developers, and that does affect things
    because developers working fast do checkouts directly off cvs instead
    of via mirrors. As well, the array is full (it is half 18GB drives
    and half 36GB drives now due to failures after replacement). All of
    them are U160 drives.

    Now there appears that the raid backplane is developing some issues,
    and at the same time, it is time for the "every three to four years"
    replace some parts plan. It's what most IT shops do as well. The
    drives are also getting a bit up there in age now. Perhaps that is
    why I am starting to lose them more often.

    But if we want more oomph, then it is time to go to U320. It is also
    time to move towards another raid controller (already have it) which
    we hope will have supported raid management soon.
  10. shut the damned thing down now... by advocate_one · · Score: 3, Insightful

    while you've still got good data... take a backup first though... but shut it down...

    --
    Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
  11. Well, okay, then... by jawtheshark · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I already donate yearly... Every november I buy the latest CD and substract the price from 100Euro. That part is simply donated. It's not much, I know, but I'm just an individual. Yes, and ever for such small amounts you make it to the donation page. Cool, eh? (This also means your name is printed on the sleeve of the CD)

    I'll make an exceptional donation... I use OpenBSD on so many systems (now even on a SMP systen... yay!) that I owe Theo and Co.

    --
    Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
  12. Re:Okay, by Homology · · Score: 4, Funny
    if I had $12,500 I'd have to offer it as a bounty for an original *BSD is dieing troll. The variation on a theme are just not as funny as they once were.

    It's well know that the troll community is suffering greatly from excessive inbreeding. It's really noticable that this inbreeding is seriously impairing their already scant intellectual skills. They are not even capable to do a simple copy/paste/replace/post. They'll quite simply breed themselves to extinction, so you can donate that bounty to OpenBSD instead.

  13. Re:token flame by BobNET · · Score: 2, Funny

    I'll donate if you switch the license to the GPL...

    Perfect, then someone will come along and offer $50 000 for a BSD-licensed version, and then the project will be back under the same license as before. Except now it will have a new RAID, $37 500 in extra cash, plus whatever money and/or hardware you planned to donate. You're a genius!

  14. Re:token flame by ulib · · Score: 2, Funny

    > [...] You're a genius!
    If the 50.000 offer were anything near serious, he definitely would be!

  15. Not just users of those projects by Bastian · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you use any OSS unix-like, or many OSS tools other than something with an Open* name, you are likely using at least a few things that have benefitted directly from the OpenBSD project. In an effort to keep OpenBSD secure, they contribute security patches to all sorts of software that runs on OpenBSD.

    In particular, I'd encourage everyone who uses Linux to contribute.

    1. Re:Not just users of those projects by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Well, OpenSSL, OpenGPS, OpenGFS, OpenOffice, OpenVB, OpenTTD, OpenVPN and OpenWFE just to name a few aren't actually associated with OpenBSD or even BSD licensed. In truth, most Open* things are under the GPL and done by other people. The good OpenBSD stuff is pf, OpenSSH, OpenBGP, OpenNTP, OpenCVS and OpenBSD itself.

  16. Apple??? by fdawg · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I thought Apple based OSX on BSD. Why aren't they flying to BSD's aid? Im actually quite surprised more big businesses aren't riddling the BSD community with money. I realize the whole OSS movement is built on the philosophy of "share and share alike", but blindly ripping the work of others without giving back is gross.

    1. Re:Apple??? by Triumph+The+Insult+C · · Score: 2, Informative

      that Apple equipment was bought by Theo using OpenBSD funds. Apple didn't donate anything, nor have they ever

      here's what theo has to say about that exact Apple equipment

      --
      vodka, straight up, thank you!
  17. Re:"Open" CVS? by Nimrangul · · Score: 2, Insightful
    FSF views anything they don't make as less free, regardless of anything you may say or think.

    Also, the FSF believes everyone has the right to all code, thus anything that allows for a closed source version of anything denies the "right" to said code and is therefore bad.

    Another note: The OSI are irrelevant, the only thing that matters for making something open source is there being access to the source; a little slip of words mean nothing, nor does the "thumbs up" from an organisation that does not contribute anything to the community, it is the access to the code that makes something open source by definition.

    --
    I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
  18. Re:Perhaps... by Nimrangul · · Score: 2, Funny
    You may not have heard about this, so I'll let you in on a secret, Compaq is dead. HP had a merger with them and now controls all that was Compaq.

    This would make it slightly difficult to buy from them.

    --
    I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
  19. Re:$12,500... what is this, MAC hardware? by Triumph+The+Insult+C · · Score: 4, Insightful

    hmm, let's look at the facts

    the person organizing the replacement (marco@) works with at lowest level of disks as a day job. he is very involved in all of the obsd scsi stuff

    you agree that scsi is "outdated super expensive technology", but offer no facts, nor have you bothered to check the configuration they currently have

    who should i consider more knowledgable in this subject matter?

    for the kind of work that cvs.openbsd.org does, ide simply will not cut it

    for storing big pr0n movies, ide works fine. for lots of cvs commits and checkouts and heavy i/o from nfs, ide sucks

    --
    vodka, straight up, thank you!
  20. Network Appliance should donate a filer by Okijames · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Network Appliance a.k.a NetApp is noticeably absent from the OpenBSD donations page (www.openbsd.org/donations.html). Anyone who uses a NetApp knows immediately that the OnTap OS is BSD, always has been BSD.

    Considering the Billions (yes, Billions) of dollars in revenue NetApp has derived from the BSDs, I am appalled at the company's lack of contribution back to the BSD community!

    Considering that a good number of their founders, engineers, and developers were educated at Berkeley (yes the B in BSD), I am doubly appalled at the company's lack of contribution!

    Now OpenBSD is looking for some storage and NetApp sits by while a POS Dell array is considered? You know, Dell, as in EMC's (NetApp's biggest competitor) biggest partner!

    HELLO? NetApp? HELLO? You should make sure that all the BSDs host their CVS repositories on NetApp, a nice BSD based platform.

    FWIW... Yes, I contribute. I have standing subscriptions and kick in a few extra bucks when needed.

    1. Re:Network Appliance should donate a filer by Okijames · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The percentage of BSD "DNA" in OnTap, far exceeds the percentage of NetApp revenue donated to the BSDs.

      1/100,000th of NetApp's 2004 revenue would just about cover the dollar amount requested by OpenBSD.

      Does anyone at NetApp care to claim that that OnTap is less than 1/100,000th BSD?

      I'm not saying NetApp "owes" anyone, they are fully within their rights per the BSD license. I am saying they would be smart to donate filers to all the BSDs. Think of the R&D ROI they could achieve. The good PR "points-per-dollar" would be higher than any marketing/advertising campaign.

      The business case for such donations is clear. It's just sad that NetApp hasn't already donated for more honorable reasons.

  21. It is done. by Nimrangul · · Score: 4, Informative

    The money has been raised, the purchase shall soon be made. The link is here and you will note that the only companies that put in any money are smaller ones and the rest of the money has come from individuals.

    --
    I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
  22. Please learn about data storage before preaching . by MarkTina · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I think in your whole mini-rant you managed to get one fact right : seek time being important for apps.

    The rest was garbage :-)

    Have a think about this ... why do clued up sys admins use SCSI/FC disks for server applications when you can buy bigger/faster/cheaper IDE disks instead ? (ignoring seektimes and command queuing etc)

    It's really a simple answer you know ... reliability. A server class disk is designed to run for years on end and be thrashed constantly, hence they are built to be more reliable than their desktop cousins. The interface used to connect them to the host is also more reliable, has more error checking and correction, is usually even made of better materials .. in all you get what you pay for!

    IDE/ATA/S-ATA is great for desktop use and for nearline storage devices (low activity archives) ... for on-line storage of sev-1 applications it's not so great.

    Just a few tidbits of knowledge I've picked up in 10 years of data storage management :-)

  23. Money's in by andkaha · · Score: 2, Informative
    Aparantly, the money has now been collected: message here

    Also, it was hard to get money from companies, and almost everything seems to have come from caring individuals: message here

    --
    It's 11pm, do you know what your deamons are up to?
  24. Re:"Open" CVS? by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Funny

    Try "less open" CVS. CVS is GPLed.

    Arguably, GPL software is more Free (with a capital F) while BSD software is more Open. I say arguably because people have been arguing about this shit on slashdot for ages (myself included.)

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"