I came into the office to the sound of something not unlike a very unhappy animal trapped under a Dremel. I knew right away that was the sound of a drive gone bad. usually you get days warning but this one was normal on last Wednesday and not normal today. the Disk Utility tool showed me which drive was bad. which was Disk 1. so I powered down, opened the case, unplugged Disk 1, and powered back on to see if the screaming stopped. it did. ahh, silence.

 

fortunately I have a spare drive(s) for this server. they weren’t that much money to begin with so it made sense to buy more at the time. there’s no telling when the next drive will fail. and for that time when only one drive is doing the work it’s not a good time to be waiting for more drives to arrive. the better to have a way to keep RAID1 alive is to have drives waiting in the wings.

the new drive had to get formatted. and once that was done I dragged it to the RAID window to add it to the list. it warned “adding this drive will destroy it’s contents.” because I named it something different I clicked yes and it started it’s rebuild. which, according to a progress bar, should be complete in about 5 hours.

total time to complete all the steps for that swap was about 15 minutes.

lessons:
drives fail. have spares.
RAID1 is an okay backup. but you should have an archive strategy for the long term.
listen for the signs of pending failure.
run one of the two apps that will notify you of a failed drive on OS X.
work or play think about how

G4 NAS drive part 2
getting Back to my Mac to actually work
Print to the Internet
ZFS one year later
and more coding, server and hacking stuff.

With the WWDC just a month away we’ll also start planning the who where for pinning down experts that might be attending the week of geek. anyway don’t hold your breath. it won’t be until the middle of the week at least until there’s a new conversation. in the mean time make a back up of your doorbell (aka phone) or learn to sync it so it’s done automagically.

see you on the other side… OWT!

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Please stand by. 

A box showed up early. A flip of a coin decides that I’m not backing anything up before upgrading. Smart that coin. 

 

2:34 installer started. 5 clicks to make it go.

2:40 I get bored. Cleaning the desk seems like a good idea.

3:10 42 minutes remain.

3:26 Finished. Liars.

3:27 installation log saved. for MacBreak Tech geekery.

3:27 rebooted!

3:28 Apple. Spinner. Blue screen.

3:31 Typing my password.

3:40 Desktop! What took you so long?

3:41 It’s bugging about Time Machine right off. 

 

Playing with Spaces first. You have to turn on the feature in the System Preferences before Control <– –> will work. So here’s the rad thing about it. If you made a habit out of Command-Tab to switch between apps, doing that will automatically switch you to the Space that the open app is in. OMFG is that coooooool. Sorry to sound like a 12 year old textr but dang.

 

Finder. Dude. No, seriously. Dude! 

 

Automator. The roboto is all changed around. Not sorted by App anymore. This makes so much more sense.

 

I’m back in the Finder and I notice that lots of things that I hadn’t noticed before because they all have previews on them. Dude. 

 

Text Edit. You have to turn Grammar on to get it to check for sentence fragments. That’s good news because I can deal with knowing my mispeelings with a red underline but I don’t care about my fragments. 

 

Speaking of words open the Dictionary, type ‘Hypercard’ and click on Apple. Then click on Wikipedia. Now type ‘dude’ and see 35 entries found for “dude.” Dude!

 

Back in the Finder. Turn on Show Path Bar in the view menu. I like that but I don’t think its going to be always on. Command-Y is going to be my new best friend. Why? Quick Look.

 

Select All. Start Speaking. It’s Bruce. I change to Alex in the System Preferences. Um. I <em>never</em> want to type that again. Shudder. Select All again and Start Speaking. I think I like Bruce better. 

 

Cover Flow in the Finder is going to ruin marriages.

 

More as I know it.