Micks' Musings

I have two linux file servers and they were both on fedora 14. I decided to upgrade them to fedora 15 and started using the two online upgrade methods - preupgrade and the Fedora documented way using yum. Both upgrades worked flawlessly but on one of the file servers it failed all the drives in the RAID6 array**. I restored from backup to fedora 14 and the RAID was fine and has stayed fine for a week since. Besides that problem I found the biggest problem with Fedora 15 is Gnome V3. It would only work in fallback mode on one system due to the PCI video card and on the other system it was really bad using VNC - the screen would not refresh - and I had to enable the fallback mode. For a system that is going to be used remotely Gnome 3 is useless - perhaps using X it may be better but with VNC it is hopeless. So I had mixed success with the upgrade - one is working fine on Fedora 15 and the other system is back at Fedora 14. ** a friend hates it when anyone says RAID array. Redundant Arra...

As luck (or Murphys Law) would have it as soon as I started writing about setting up my new file server it crashed and would no longer boot! It started getting kernel panics and other errors and I have tracked it down to careless application of Linux system updates and NOT rebooting immediately after applying them. The result was a non-booting system which would not even boot from an older kernel (accessed by using grub). So I had to reinstall Fedora 14. I did run memtest to check for memory problems and I swapped out the PCI-Express Video card for a PCI card so I also installed another PCE-Express RAID card to give the system the full 24 SATA ports. Everything was fine with the hardware checks.

After less than two years my media server was no longer able to be expanded. There was no more room to add disks and it had heating issues - it couldn't be kept cool enough. So it was time to plan the replacement. Based on what I have learnt from the build and operation of the first one I came up with a short list. 1. Must be able to be significantly expanded with more disks 2. Must have good cooling 3. It will run a recent linux 4. Because of the number of disks it will use RAID6 These criteria should help to address some of the shortcomings of the first file server. With RAID5 it was always a significant worry when a disk failed as the rebuild phase was a prime candidate to have another disk failure. With RAID6 there is the still a risk of a disk failure during the rebuild phase but it is reduced as there are two parity disks. Also if you have to wait for a new disk to arrive the RAID6 still has one parity disk left. To get good cooling and room for lots of disks meant researchin...