We have hundreds of drives in Coraid SAN shelves. In our first batch of maybe four or five 15-drive shelves, we bought our own drives-- Seagate with 5 year warranties. We had a high initial rate of failure in the first 6 months, followed by a low but steady rate from then until the warranties were up. We had spares, Seagate was good about getting us replacements relatively quickly, were weren't happy, but it was workable.
All the newer shelves came preloaded with Coraid-approved drives. As I said, there's hundreds of drives involved here, a lot of SATA 1TB and 2TB and some SAS 600GB. I think out of the later drives, we've had two fail. Maybe three.
Asked about it, Coraid said, yes, the warranty is better on "Enterprise-class" or "RAID-class" drives, but also, the firmware is different. They claim that drives intended for the consumer / SOHO market spend a lot of time retrying marginal reads before declaring an unreadable sector and sparing it. They say that SAN-class drives limit the retry time, because the array controller handles it more efficiently, since it has the big-picture view.
The also say that the drives are optimized for close-quarters operation, all jammed together in an array, handling vibration and heat build-up slightly differently, and that they have minor differences to keep lubrication from migrating out of the spindle bearing under continuous operation. I don't know but I imagine loss of spindle bearing lube would add vibration and make any but the best reads more marginal.
I don't know for sure, but we've spent a great deal of US dollars on their products and our experience has borne out the fact that there's a definite difference in arrays.
As for corporate desktop and/or server use, well, I don't really know. Our servers that have one to four drives were mostly shipped with those drives, so we didn't choose them. I can't tell you if they are enterprise class drives, but I imagine they are, based on the replacement costs. And I know about what some of those costs are, or anyhow I know they were way more than I personally pay for drives for home desktop and server use. I know that because occasionally they fail, and I have to buy new ones.
A programming language created for the Department of Defense and used there from 1977 to 1983 was named Ada, in honor of Lady Babbage.
Babbage's Analytical Engine was never completed, right? Having those custom made castings and machined parts got really expensive.
Does anyone else find it ironic that the chosen language of the US DOD was named for the first programming project to go over-budget and behind schedule?
I can't be the only/. reader who works below ground. None of our WiFi, 3G, 4G devices work down here. Well, not entirely true-- I'm in the IT department, so yes, I have access to the company WiFi on my phone. But the general user population here doesn't.
As recently as 2 years ago, there wasn't a cell carrier in town that penetrate to the depths. Now those employees and visitors whose phones use one particular carrier can make a receive calls in certain parts of our suite. Those in other departments apart from the two not on the lower level don't have that problem.
It's not that we don't believe in advanced (beyond voice) communications. We completed a move to Asterisk open source PBX last year and are working on more and more integration. But not wireless. Many many people whose building has office space in the lower levels are a little RF starved.
I worked on the project that was eventually bought out by De Laval. It was originally called HerdStar. I kid you not. Never got sued by the maker of the dominant word processing software of the day. That statement should pretty well pin this down in time, and if not, this will: The first several generations were written in Fortran for the 8080 machines widely available at the time. Certain stuff they wanted to work faster or differently than Fortran could offer, I wrote for them in 8080 assembly.
One thing the dairymen told me was that one of the first signs of an animal getting sick was that it would usually eat less. Our system at the time each animal had a collar with a transponder on it-- an unpowered device about the size of two decks of cards. Something like a very primitive RFID chip. How much each animal ate was recorded and any unusual patterns were brought to the attention of the owners or managers. As soon as such pattern developed, the animal could be examined and treated. This makes good economic sense, because healthy cows produce more. But it struck me as compassionate as well.
We also discovered that some cows would game the system, realizing that every time they stuck their head into the feeder, that auger would start up and dump grain into the trough. We fixed it so they would only get a healthy amount at a crack. They figured out that putting your head in, pulling it out, and putting it in again would get you another pile of goodies. We modified it again, so it wouldn't do that. The cows that had been gaming the system were fine, but certain others would never go back after it stopped delivering feed for them. So we modified it again so that even if you'd already had your allocation, sticking your head in again would still net you another handful. Just enough to keep them coming back when they got hungry, and more importantly, the next day, and the day after that, etc.
It was really fun trying to outthink cows. It wasn't nearly as easy as you'd think.
Examples of very young hams abound. Documented cases of VEs (volunteer examiners) helping examinees cheat are few, and in comparison, nearly nonexistent.
Ya. WordPerfect Office 12 is the standard around here for our roughly 200 employees that use PCs. The other 1000 are on vehicles most of the time and don't use any software.
Then we have a few people that interact a great deal more with other companies, local government and etc. For them we have to buy license of Microsoft Word, because abovementioned external parties continue to mindlessly send us stuff in Word format, often @#%$@#%&^%$#*&.DOCX format, and the users aren't happy with Word Viewer, Catdoc, or other tools. Worse, many have to send docs to other agencies who insist on a proprietary format from a monolithic single-source vendor.
WordPerfect mostly works ok and about 30% of my users don't realize they aren't using Bill's program. It has a few issues. There's a piece of code that sits in memory after you print until you're done until you exit WP. After printing the second doc with complicated images and layout, that piece tends to lockup and take 100% of the cpu. It never finishes what it was doing. So we just kill that piece, don't even exit WP, and life goeth on.
I love "reveal codes." Why don't all wordprocs have that? Untangles some really twisty little problems, especially when my users import docs from another source, edit it, and the result is a tangled mess.
You want to know the funniest part of this? As part of the support team for this, I have to assume when users call and say they are having a problem with "Word" that they mean "WordPerfect:" because that's what they all call it.
On our network, which is located In The Real World, users bring in rogue access points from home, horribly infected laptops (again, from home) and even IP phones. They try to plug in devices with DHCP servers built into them. Any solution that automatically adds a machine, without one of us "propeller heads" reviewing it, is likely to (and actually has) disable whole buildings full of users. Angry users. I'm talking about stuff that can happen, but also about the stuff that has already happened in our less vigilant days.
Some sort of autodiscovery would be fine, if it put newly discovered objects into a "hey I found this" list that we'd have to manually move to a "access allowed" group of some kind as appropriate for that object's location and purpose.
Yes! FWBuilder is all we use for the enterprise. We have basic servers with multiple NICs (three on the edge firewalls- inside, outside, and DMZ) all managed by FWBuilder. Access to the one machine running FWBuilder is controlled carefully. That's all we need.
Sure it's unique. But the FCC database is public information, and I don't always want my street address associated with an email ID or etc. Not where it can be so freely mined.
And some ISP's still insist we add characters to our federally issued, guaranteed unique callsigns. I don't use ISP and mail providers like that (stupid) anymore.
Actually, hams sometimes use 75 ohm coax when all the equipment is designed for 50 ohm-- that represents a 1.5:1 mismatch, which is tolerable if you don't mind some loss. But the really bad thing about using 10Base2 for ethernet is the wiring restrictions- you can only put so many stations (devices) on one length of cable, and you have to have a BNC Tee connection for every one, and you have to have 50-ohm termination plugs at both ends, and an issue with ANY station on the cable will probably disable all of them- 10Base2 is bus-wired. I used to maintain a coax network, and it was trouble about 6 times a month at first. Things improved once I get the dicey connections replaced, but it never got better than about 2 or 3 failures a month.
The right tools for the right job: Get a 110-punchdown tool (or one with 66 and 110 blades) for $60-70. Don't bother with the stupid plastic ones that come with the cat5 wall jacks-- you need one that's spring loaded and sets the wires with a nice solid THUNK. You can get the wall plates and inserts from any big box store now, and Radio Shock (sic) and some hardware stores.
Screw terminals- gaa. You want me to strip and fan out 8 wires (no cheating by just doing the blue, and green pairs) and then mess around with a little screw driver? No thanks. I can terminate about 5 to 7 of them per hour, including the occasional re-do, with a punch tool.
'Sides, if you want to work the best, you have to maintain the twist right up to the terminals. Try that with screws. I run gigabit over my home-terminated jacks and home-made jumpers all the time, and I don't have any errors or retries at my switch ports.
What he said! Besides the coax was probably for TV antenna or cable TV and as such is 75 ohm impedance. That's no fracking good for 10Base2 (ethernet over coax) and it might not work with some types of balun (coax to twisted pair widgets).
Use the coax to drag in a pull-string or a cat5e run. That's the best use for it. Unless you need to equip locations for OTR or cable TV.
Indeed, one can purchase a few vital components (boards) and create a SDR (software defined radio) and from there, you write your own radio, as in code.
Here's one http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS3911104852.html for US $85k.
Too much? Try this: http://www.flex-radio.com/ where you'll find lots of options.
SMART is SMART, platform independent. Your OS's way of sending SMART commands to the drive and getting the results back may vary; the venerable smartctl on the command line is the one I'm most familiar with.
In PC's, some of the BIOSs have an option to enable SMART. Most of them simply send the "-a on" command to enable the drives SMART processes. Many also do a "-H" for a basic health check of the drive, and squawk at you during the post if it fails. I'm wondering if the mac does something very similar. If so, a delay of about a second or maybe less is about right.
Use of smartctl -h/dev/sda is a good measure of how the drive is, but it's very basic. Then again, it sure beats a poke in the eye with a sharp SIMM. Or a drive that dies without any warning.
I use 3Ware raid controllers and SMART can "look through" the controller to the individual drives and run tests, read back the logs, etc. There's some fussiness at first setting it up (tell smart that the drive is type 3ware,n where n is the disk number, and refer to it as/dev/twe1, twe2, etc for SMART purposes) but it's not hard.
I have my 8506 controller's drives all getting short tests every night and all getting long tests early AM every Sunday morning.
I'm a big believer in the Smart tools and I'm pretty sure I've headed off major data loss twice now on drives that started to fail and were replaced before going completely sideways. Not to mention the box of 80gb drives I bought at a swap a few years ago for about $10 a drive. The few that failed SMART out of the box became paperweights and test/temporary drives, even though they seem to work. A few of the SMART failure went toes-up a short time later. The ones that passed are still humming along happily.
Getting a cellphone call through during an emergency is iffy, but if you weren't personally a ham, can you see where finding a ham, and getting them to put your message through to somebody else who isn't a ham, would be even more iffy?
Well, a few things I can't agree with you about in the above. First, the problem with communications in past emergencies is not so much that you can't call your aunt mildred in the earthquake zone (although that's not good) it's that law enforcement, public safety/emergency medical, and emergency government agencies can't reach their people, can't reach the disaster zone, and have trouble communicating. They depend quite a bit on wired phone, cell phone, and other services like SMS, and other RF-based devices, from pagers on up to Blackberry. When overloaded by a disaster situation, phone switches don't degrade linearly with load. Some of them crash, others degrade along a much steeper curve than a linear one-- it gets worse faster the worse it gets.
This is where amateur radio volunteers have really been able to shine. The are preorganized in large part, they have trained in advanced (and gotten certified) in structured communications. Many keep a "go box" handy, stocked with handheld and mobile radios, batteries, fold-up antennae, and everything they need for emergency digital and voice comms. They go camping every year in an weekend-long emergency preparedness drill thinly disguised as a contest, and perform formalized communications in campgrounds and parks, without commercial power, and with restrictions on when they can arrive and begin setup.
Amateurs often serve individuals, but in a disaster situations, their most critical work is with the served agencies with which they have predefined relationships and interfaces already set up, long before the hurricane (etc) strikes. You don't have to know a ham personally. You benefit from their work as volunteers, probably without knowing it.
I'm saying we should work to fix things so they don't happen anymore. Clearly, emergency services should be able to communicate. It seems like this was called out as a major need after both 911 and Katrina.
Strides have been made, things have been fixed. But its shocking how little progress has been made. How fast and how radically do you expect the government to move on this stuff? The need for licensed amateur radio volunteers has not diminished. Certainly the call from the served agencies has not.
Not going to happen any time soon. Hams continue to innovate and work on the cutting edge of new tech, pushing it further along. Some of the best in SDR (software defined radios) are developed by hams as an open-source, community developed and supported project. Hams are always trying to beat their own distance records, and in some bands, nobody else has ever bested the records achieved by hams.
And as long as telecommunications companies continue to plan/build their infrastructure based on the predicate that only 30 to 35% of capacity will even be used at once, their systems will continue to fail whenever there's a natural or made-made disaster. What's the first thing that happens when a hurricane/earthquake/fire/flood/etc hits the news? EVERYONE who knows someone in the area starts calling. All the news agencies start calling into the area to get updates. The wired and cell networks collapse. Hams are the only way of getting health and welfare and strategic information in/out of the are. Remember Katrina? Long before it made landfall, people would pick up a phone and wait 30 seconds to 2 minutes for a dialtone, if they ever got one. I was sitting in an SBC long distance operations center at the time, and I saw it happen. Local CO after CO inundated by calls-- or water. Hourly updates on which switching centers still had enough diesel to keep generators running, and which were on UPS batteries and therefore had only hours before going off the air.
Even if no infrastructure is damaged, like lines or CO's, the switches are overwhelmed by a fraction of the theorectical maximum traffic. The telecomms are never going to overbuild enough to prevent this, because it's expensive, and would only be used once in a while, when bad things happen. Can't fault them too much (ok, I fault them some) since they're in business to make money.
And health & safety & law enforcement interagency communications? Don't get me started. Last year in some of the big wildfires, hams had to shadow groups of cops, national guard, redcross, and firefighters, because none of them could talk to each other. The same was true of the big floods a few years back.
I used to like to listen to the shuttle schools program, where the shuttle astronauts spend a hour or more taking questions from kids in a school where local hams have set up some equipment beforehand. I think the program was called ARISS. You can download Orbitron http://www.stoff.pl/ which will track anything in orbit on a cool world map like on the big screens at Mission Control in Houston. Wait until the orbital track of the shuttle gets close to you and the gray footprint line crosses your location, and listen. You don't need any watts to do that, not even a ham radio, just a scanner that can reach the 2-meter ham band (somewhere between 144.000 MHz and 148.000 MHz, probably 145.850 ??
If you do have a license and a radio, between 75% and 100% of astronauts on any given shuttle mission, and ISS crews, are licensed amateur radio operators, and they will talk to you if they have time.
Speaking of satellites, amateur radio groups have launched dozens of their own, and indeed the ISS space station is also one-- there's several repeaters on board for voice, digital, and code. Amateur satellites are often called OSCAR with a number: Orbital Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio. The thing I think is funny is that hams often refer to OSCAR-0, meaning the original orbital target, the moon. Moonbounce operation takes a bit more than 5 watts though. Some hams have HUGE arrays of antennae ("aluminum farms") for the this mode. The surface of the moon is not an efficient reflector, but there isn't much atmosphere to diffuse your signal, and people do it all the time. There's something like 20 major ham radio satellites in operational status and more in various other states. They operate on HF, VHF, UHF, and microwave frequencies from 21.138 MHz to 24048.025 MHz
I'm pretty sure that among the long list of "served agencies" FEMA appears. I'm pretty also impressed by other agencies embrace of amateur radio- the elaborate radio room set up both at the National Weather Service office here in S.E. Wisconsin and at the downtown Red Cross building. In both cases, the staff of the served agency can't use the equipment. It just sits there until an emergency net is activated and the hams come a-runnin'. Of course there's drills, training, and other activity to keep any dust from settling on the gear.
Local ARES and RACES groups are often the core of the volunteer organizations locally/regionally. The Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES) consists of licensed amateurs who have voluntarily registered their qualifications and equipment for communications duty in the public service when disaster strikes.
Home page: http://www.ares.org/ Nice summary: http://www.arrl.org/FandES/field/pscm/sec1-ch1.html
RACES (Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service) is less active in my area and I think I heard that they were combining some activities with the local ARES folks. Administered by local, county and state emergency management agencies, and supported by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
http://www.races.net/
And as I say whenever I get the chance, it has never been easier to be a ham. All morse code requirements have been removed from the licensing process, and anyone that can study for a test can pass the exam. Once that's done, there's a huge core of groups out there to help you get started. There's also groups that meet for training for the exams, if you like that idea better than studying on your own.
Tom, N9QQB, member of the Milwaukee 145.130 repeater, 1000 watts of RF goodness at your fingertips. IRLP node number 5590 - call us from anywhere in the world via internet link.
Lady Ada's contribution to Babbage's Difference engine is debated, but what is known is that the project was never completed.
Some years ago, the US Department of Defense issued a decree that code for the DOD shall be written in ADA. Strangely fitting that the chosen language of the DOD was named after the first programming project to go over budget and behind schedule.
If the RAID controller dies, and you bought an industry standard RAID card (like you shoulda), just replacing the card should bring it all back. Oh, wait, you used the RAID chip on your motherboard? Oh well, sorry, you have a problem. THEY are hard to replace, and consume host CPU and memory. Use a 3Ware card-- you can even "look through the 3ware raid cards with SMART (you are using SMART, right?!?!?) and see the individual drives! I'm doing that right now on a linux box. You can get a 3Ware SATA raid card on ePay affordably, and extra peace of mind comes with it at no additional cost.
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All the newer shelves came preloaded with Coraid-approved drives. As I said, there's hundreds of drives involved here, a lot of SATA 1TB and 2TB and some SAS 600GB. I think out of the later drives, we've had two fail. Maybe three.
Asked about it, Coraid said, yes, the warranty is better on "Enterprise-class" or "RAID-class" drives, but also, the firmware is different. They claim that drives intended for the consumer / SOHO market spend a lot of time retrying marginal reads before declaring an unreadable sector and sparing it. They say that SAN-class drives limit the retry time, because the array controller handles it more efficiently, since it has the big-picture view.
The also say that the drives are optimized for close-quarters operation, all jammed together in an array, handling vibration and heat build-up slightly differently, and that they have minor differences to keep lubrication from migrating out of the spindle bearing under continuous operation. I don't know but I imagine loss of spindle bearing lube would add vibration and make any but the best reads more marginal.
I don't know for sure, but we've spent a great deal of US dollars on their products and our experience has borne out the fact that there's a definite difference in arrays.
As for corporate desktop and/or server use, well, I don't really know. Our servers that have one to four drives were mostly shipped with those drives, so we didn't choose them. I can't tell you if they are enterprise class drives, but I imagine they are, based on the replacement costs. And I know about what some of those costs are, or anyhow I know they were way more than I personally pay for drives for home desktop and server use. I know that because occasionally they fail, and I have to buy new ones.
Babbage's Analytical Engine was never completed, right? Having those custom made castings and machined parts got really expensive.
Does anyone else find it ironic that the chosen language of the US DOD was named for the first programming project to go over-budget and behind schedule?
I can't be the only /. reader who works below ground. None of our WiFi, 3G, 4G devices work down here. Well, not entirely true-- I'm in the IT department, so yes, I have access to the company WiFi on my phone. But the general user population here doesn't.
As recently as 2 years ago, there wasn't a cell carrier in town that penetrate to the depths. Now those employees and visitors whose phones use one particular carrier can make a receive calls in certain parts of our suite. Those in other departments apart from the two not on the lower level don't have that problem.
It's not that we don't believe in advanced (beyond voice) communications. We completed a move to Asterisk open source PBX last year and are working on more and more integration. But not wireless. Many many people whose building has office space in the lower levels are a little RF starved.
One thing the dairymen told me was that one of the first signs of an animal getting sick was that it would usually eat less. Our system at the time each animal had a collar with a transponder on it-- an unpowered device about the size of two decks of cards. Something like a very primitive RFID chip. How much each animal ate was recorded and any unusual patterns were brought to the attention of the owners or managers. As soon as such pattern developed, the animal could be examined and treated. This makes good economic sense, because healthy cows produce more. But it struck me as compassionate as well.
We also discovered that some cows would game the system, realizing that every time they stuck their head into the feeder, that auger would start up and dump grain into the trough. We fixed it so they would only get a healthy amount at a crack. They figured out that putting your head in, pulling it out, and putting it in again would get you another pile of goodies. We modified it again, so it wouldn't do that. The cows that had been gaming the system were fine, but certain others would never go back after it stopped delivering feed for them. So we modified it again so that even if you'd already had your allocation, sticking your head in again would still net you another handful. Just enough to keep them coming back when they got hungry, and more importantly, the next day, and the day after that, etc.
It was really fun trying to outthink cows. It wasn't nearly as easy as you'd think.
Can't reach http://www.raspbian.org/ -- maybe already slashdotted. Google seems to confirm this address is correct.
Examples of very young hams abound. Documented cases of VEs (volunteer examiners) helping examinees cheat are few, and in comparison, nearly nonexistent.
Say, what is this lysdexia thing I keep reading about?
Then we have a few people that interact a great deal more with other companies, local government and etc. For them we have to buy license of Microsoft Word, because abovementioned external parties continue to mindlessly send us stuff in Word format, often @#%$@#%&^%$#*& .DOCX format, and the users aren't happy with Word Viewer, Catdoc, or other tools. Worse, many have to send docs to other agencies who insist on a proprietary format from a monolithic single-source vendor.
WordPerfect mostly works ok and about 30% of my users don't realize they aren't using Bill's program. It has a few issues. There's a piece of code that sits in memory after you print until you're done until you exit WP. After printing the second doc with complicated images and layout, that piece tends to lockup and take 100% of the cpu. It never finishes what it was doing. So we just kill that piece, don't even exit WP, and life goeth on.
I love "reveal codes." Why don't all wordprocs have that? Untangles some really twisty little problems, especially when my users import docs from another source, edit it, and the result is a tangled mess.
You want to know the funniest part of this? As part of the support team for this, I have to assume when users call and say they are having a problem with "Word" that they mean "WordPerfect:" because that's what they all call it.
On our network, which is located In The Real World, users bring in rogue access points from home, horribly infected laptops (again, from home) and even IP phones. They try to plug in devices with DHCP servers built into them. Any solution that automatically adds a machine, without one of us "propeller heads" reviewing it, is likely to (and actually has) disable whole buildings full of users. Angry users. I'm talking about stuff that can happen, but also about the stuff that has already happened in our less vigilant days. Some sort of autodiscovery would be fine, if it put newly discovered objects into a "hey I found this" list that we'd have to manually move to a "access allowed" group of some kind as appropriate for that object's location and purpose.
Yes! FWBuilder is all we use for the enterprise. We have basic servers with multiple NICs (three on the edge firewalls- inside, outside, and DMZ) all managed by FWBuilder. Access to the one machine running FWBuilder is controlled carefully. That's all we need.
Sure it's unique. But the FCC database is public information, and I don't always want my street address associated with an email ID or etc. Not where it can be so freely mined. And some ISP's still insist we add characters to our federally issued, guaranteed unique callsigns. I don't use ISP and mail providers like that (stupid) anymore.
What kind of connectivity? My crystal ball being a little cloudy at the moment, I'd say PVC PIPE! Then you can put anything in it you want, any time.
Actually, hams sometimes use 75 ohm coax when all the equipment is designed for 50 ohm-- that represents a 1.5:1 mismatch, which is tolerable if you don't mind some loss. But the really bad thing about using 10Base2 for ethernet is the wiring restrictions- you can only put so many stations (devices) on one length of cable, and you have to have a BNC Tee connection for every one, and you have to have 50-ohm termination plugs at both ends, and an issue with ANY station on the cable will probably disable all of them- 10Base2 is bus-wired. I used to maintain a coax network, and it was trouble about 6 times a month at first. Things improved once I get the dicey connections replaced, but it never got better than about 2 or 3 failures a month.
The right tools for the right job: Get a 110-punchdown tool (or one with 66 and 110 blades) for $60-70. Don't bother with the stupid plastic ones that come with the cat5 wall jacks-- you need one that's spring loaded and sets the wires with a nice solid THUNK. You can get the wall plates and inserts from any big box store now, and Radio Shock (sic) and some hardware stores. Screw terminals- gaa. You want me to strip and fan out 8 wires (no cheating by just doing the blue, and green pairs) and then mess around with a little screw driver? No thanks. I can terminate about 5 to 7 of them per hour, including the occasional re-do, with a punch tool. 'Sides, if you want to work the best, you have to maintain the twist right up to the terminals. Try that with screws. I run gigabit over my home-terminated jacks and home-made jumpers all the time, and I don't have any errors or retries at my switch ports.
What he said! Besides the coax was probably for TV antenna or cable TV and as such is 75 ohm impedance. That's no fracking good for 10Base2 (ethernet over coax) and it might not work with some types of balun (coax to twisted pair widgets). Use the coax to drag in a pull-string or a cat5e run. That's the best use for it. Unless you need to equip locations for OTR or cable TV.
Indeed, one can purchase a few vital components (boards) and create a SDR (software defined radio) and from there, you write your own radio, as in code. Here's one http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS3911104852.html for US $85k. Too much? Try this: http://www.flex-radio.com/ where you'll find lots of options.
In PC's, some of the BIOSs have an option to enable SMART. Most of them simply send the "-a on" command to enable the drives SMART processes. Many also do a "-H" for a basic health check of the drive, and squawk at you during the post if it fails. I'm wondering if the mac does something very similar. If so, a delay of about a second or maybe less is about right.
Use of smartctl -h /dev/sda is a good measure of how the drive is, but it's very basic. Then again, it sure beats a poke in the eye with a sharp SIMM. Or a drive that dies without any warning.
I have my 8506 controller's drives all getting short tests every night and all getting long tests early AM every Sunday morning.
I'm a big believer in the Smart tools and I'm pretty sure I've headed off major data loss twice now on drives that started to fail and were replaced before going completely sideways. Not to mention the box of 80gb drives I bought at a swap a few years ago for about $10 a drive. The few that failed SMART out of the box became paperweights and test/temporary drives, even though they seem to work. A few of the SMART failure went toes-up a short time later. The ones that passed are still humming along happily.
Woohoo! Six meters here I come. 73 de N9QQB
Well, a few things I can't agree with you about in the above. First, the problem with communications in past emergencies is not so much that you can't call your aunt mildred in the earthquake zone (although that's not good) it's that law enforcement, public safety/emergency medical, and emergency government agencies can't reach their people, can't reach the disaster zone, and have trouble communicating. They depend quite a bit on wired phone, cell phone, and other services like SMS, and other RF-based devices, from pagers on up to Blackberry. When overloaded by a disaster situation, phone switches don't degrade linearly with load. Some of them crash, others degrade along a much steeper curve than a linear one-- it gets worse faster the worse it gets.
This is where amateur radio volunteers have really been able to shine. The are preorganized in large part, they have trained in advanced (and gotten certified) in structured communications. Many keep a "go box" handy, stocked with handheld and mobile radios, batteries, fold-up antennae, and everything they need for emergency digital and voice comms. They go camping every year in an weekend-long emergency preparedness drill thinly disguised as a contest, and perform formalized communications in campgrounds and parks, without commercial power, and with restrictions on when they can arrive and begin setup.
Amateurs often serve individuals, but in a disaster situations, their most critical work is with the served agencies with which they have predefined relationships and interfaces already set up, long before the hurricane (etc) strikes. You don't have to know a ham personally. You benefit from their work as volunteers, probably without knowing it.
I'm saying we should work to fix things so they don't happen anymore. Clearly, emergency services should be able to communicate. It seems like this was called out as a major need after both 911 and Katrina.
Strides have been made, things have been fixed. But its shocking how little progress has been made. How fast and how radically do you expect the government to move on this stuff? The need for licensed amateur radio volunteers has not diminished. Certainly the call from the served agencies has not.
de N9QQB
And as long as telecommunications companies continue to plan/build their infrastructure based on the predicate that only 30 to 35% of capacity will even be used at once, their systems will continue to fail whenever there's a natural or made-made disaster. What's the first thing that happens when a hurricane/earthquake/fire/flood/etc hits the news? EVERYONE who knows someone in the area starts calling. All the news agencies start calling into the area to get updates. The wired and cell networks collapse. Hams are the only way of getting health and welfare and strategic information in/out of the are. Remember Katrina? Long before it made landfall, people would pick up a phone and wait 30 seconds to 2 minutes for a dialtone, if they ever got one. I was sitting in an SBC long distance operations center at the time, and I saw it happen. Local CO after CO inundated by calls-- or water. Hourly updates on which switching centers still had enough diesel to keep generators running, and which were on UPS batteries and therefore had only hours before going off the air.
Even if no infrastructure is damaged, like lines or CO's, the switches are overwhelmed by a fraction of the theorectical maximum traffic. The telecomms are never going to overbuild enough to prevent this, because it's expensive, and would only be used once in a while, when bad things happen. Can't fault them too much (ok, I fault them some) since they're in business to make money.
And health & safety & law enforcement interagency communications? Don't get me started. Last year in some of the big wildfires, hams had to shadow groups of cops, national guard, redcross, and firefighters, because none of them could talk to each other. The same was true of the big floods a few years back.
73 de N9QQB
If you do have a license and a radio, between 75% and 100% of astronauts on any given shuttle mission, and ISS crews, are licensed amateur radio operators, and they will talk to you if they have time.
Speaking of satellites, amateur radio groups have launched dozens of their own, and indeed the ISS space station is also one-- there's several repeaters on board for voice, digital, and code. Amateur satellites are often called OSCAR with a number: Orbital Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio. The thing I think is funny is that hams often refer to OSCAR-0, meaning the original orbital target, the moon. Moonbounce operation takes a bit more than 5 watts though. Some hams have HUGE arrays of antennae ("aluminum farms") for the this mode. The surface of the moon is not an efficient reflector, but there isn't much atmosphere to diffuse your signal, and people do it all the time. There's something like 20 major ham radio satellites in operational status and more in various other states. They operate on HF, VHF, UHF, and microwave frequencies from 21.138 MHz to 24048.025 MHz
More on amateur satellites here: http://www.amsat.org/amsat-new/index.php
73 de N9QQB
Milwaukee MAARS 145.130 repeater, 1000 watts of RF Goodness at your fingertips.
Local ARES and RACES groups are often the core of the volunteer organizations locally/regionally. The Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES) consists of licensed amateurs who have voluntarily registered their qualifications and equipment for communications duty in the public service when disaster strikes.
Home page: http://www.ares.org/
Nice summary: http://www.arrl.org/FandES/field/pscm/sec1-ch1.html
RACES (Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service) is less active in my area and I think I heard that they were combining some activities with the local ARES folks. Administered by local, county and state emergency management agencies, and supported by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
http://www.races.net/
And as I say whenever I get the chance, it has never been easier to be a ham. All morse code requirements have been removed from the licensing process, and anyone that can study for a test can pass the exam. Once that's done, there's a huge core of groups out there to help you get started. There's also groups that meet for training for the exams, if you like that idea better than studying on your own.
Tom, N9QQB, member of the Milwaukee 145.130 repeater, 1000 watts of RF goodness at your fingertips. IRLP node number 5590 - call us from anywhere in the world via internet link.
73 de N9QQB
Some years ago, the US Department of Defense issued a decree that code for the DOD shall be written in ADA. Strangely fitting that the chosen language of the DOD was named after the first programming project to go over budget and behind schedule.
If the RAID controller dies, and you bought an industry standard RAID card (like you shoulda), just replacing the card should bring it all back. Oh, wait, you used the RAID chip on your motherboard? Oh well, sorry, you have a problem. THEY are hard to replace, and consume host CPU and memory. Use a 3Ware card-- you can even "look through the 3ware raid cards with SMART (you are using SMART, right?!?!?) and see the individual drives! I'm doing that right now on a linux box. You can get a 3Ware SATA raid card on ePay affordably, and extra peace of mind comes with it at no additional cost.