From owner-freebsd-isp Wed Sep 20 12:47: 7 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Received: from ns2.uncanny.net (ns2.uncanny.net [140.174.20.7]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4DE4E37B43C; Wed, 20 Sep 2000 12:46:56 -0700 (PDT) Received: from sandbox.uncanny.net (sandbox.uncanny.net [140.174.20.254]) by ns2.uncanny.net (8.9.2/8.9.2) with ESMTP id MAA45703; Wed, 20 Sep 2000 12:58:27 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from ee@uncanny.net) Message-Id: <200009201958.MAA45703@ns2.uncanny.net> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Frustration with SCSI system Reply-To: Edward Elhauge Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 12:58:27 -0700 From: Edward Elhauge Sender: owner-freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Hello Freebsders, I've been using FreeBSD over the last 6 years (since I switched from NetBSD) to run a small ISP out of my basement. I've had about six disk crashes in as many years and still don't know how to work reliably with them. I have installed UPS boxes on each machine and that seems to have lowered the incidence of failure, but failures still happen; yesterday during our heat wave in the San Francisco area (possible brownouts also) I had another. OK, so you have to expect these things; but I never seem to find an easy way to recover these systems. The only thing that I've seen work has been to mount the disk on another system, back it up, reformat the drive, copy things back over and find out what was trashed. THERE MUST BE A BETTER WAY. It seems like SCSI systems can't use the bad144 program. They are supposed to autorecover on bad sectors, but every system that I've had to recover seems to be in a state where the bad sectors aren't remapping. I've tried buying top of the line hardware, and it does work faster, but no more reliably than the cheap stuff. Once you get in this state it is difficult to mount the partitions so as to recover what is there. I really need some good advice here. Do I need to buy RAID hardware for each and every server in my network? Is there some way to force the SCSI system to remap bad drives? The error I'm getting is: MEDIUM ERROR info:1010f asc:14,1 My configuration is: 1) Pentium-S 100 Mz 2) 128M 3) Adaptec 2940 Ultra/Ultra SCSI with Bios 1.25 4) Seagate ST3437 4GB 5) FreeBSD 3.4 Any advice on how to efficiently bring my server back up or how I can reengineer my system to avoid this in the future, will be greatly appreciated. -- Edward Elhauge -- Uncanny Inc., San Francisco "War is like love; it always finds a way." -- Bertold Brecht To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message