Dave's Not Here

Last week was a week of pure IT hell for me. It started off fine . . . just a few little tasks to do. And, the repercussions are still not over yet.

First, my NAS started failing. I bought two 1Tb drives, and decided that since I never eliminated my server, I might as well use it. Especially since I got AFP working, and it shares files VERY WELL to my macs now. So, I started backing up data from my NAS. But, it kept disconnecting. “No worries,” I thought, “I’ll just pull the drive out, and extract the data from it.” Should have been easy enough. ReiserFS filesystem. Very readable by linux. But, no, the drive would not mount. No normal partition table, and, nothing I tried could extract the data.

So, I plugged the drive back into the NAS. I’d just keep retrying till I got off all the data. But, whatever I did by disconnecting the drive was fatal. When the NAS did come back up, it was empty. NAS went into the trash, and drive is now on my spares pile, though, I doubt I’ll ever need a spare IDE drive. Luckily, my brother had a copy of most of my music (Being FedEx’ed at the moment — should arrive today). But, I did lose all my audio books, all my recent iTunes purchases, all my e-Books, and most of my recent downloads. The lesson I did take away was to use raid 0 now — even for stuff I don’t care about that much, because I do care SOME 🙂

Todo: install the 2, 1Tb drives, get them up with LVM, and start restoring. This may be a bit tough, since I can’t find the third rack in my little hot plug drive bays. GRRRR

But, that was a minor annoyance compared to the other IT issue.

I decided to reboot my iMac. The NAS NFS connection wouldn’t shut down, and I decided it had been a while since I rebooted (like months), so, why not reboot. When it came back up, I accidentally missed with the mouse and clicked the guest account. Annoying. It came back to the login page by itself. Strange. I logged in as my regular user, and my home directory was gone. In Mac speak: This means that all of my personal files, videos, movies, etc are all gone. No documents. No web pages. No iMovie stuff, nothing. After some googling, I found the reason: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10346974-263.html

I had added a guest account for my Lojack software. The thought was: if someone steals my mac, I want him/her to use it, not simply reinstall it, so that the lojack can track them. And, obviously, I had that installed in Leopard. So, complete loss.

But — I had just started using Mozy.com for backups. So, I try to restore. The tool just hangs. I contact support and they say I need to do a web restore. Ok — I schedule it, and it takes a couple of days for the files to be ready for download. All 200Gb of them. I start downloading them, 88 files total, and finally finish the next day. I noticed many were named restore-blah.dmg, so I look at those, and they’re all my user directory. Sweet. I extract them like this: rsync -av /Volumes/resotre*.dmg/ /Users/codemonkey/Restore Another few hours pass, and I have all my data. I move it back to my user directory, and everythign just acts strange.

My documents seem to be there, but all the settings don’t work. Then I tried to open a document — and it doesn’t work. After some searching, I realize I need to decrypt all the files. Grr . . So, I start back over, mounting the 60 or so restore files, redo the rsync, and run the mozy decrypt.

Finally, I’m back up. But, I do seem to have lost a bit of data . . just the most recent.

So, total casualties: Recent work on iMac: So far, my mavis rankings and Amy’s Caveman movie.

And, work to be done:
On server:

• Move OS disk to permanent mount place.
• Add two 1Tb disks
• Lots of LVM work to get 1Tb disks happy.
• Possibly remove existing 1Tb Disk, or add it to the LVM as well — not sure yet.  (And, this assumes I find that stinkin bracket.

On iMac

• Add Time Machine drive to it, so that restores like this don’t take the better part of a week.
• Try to find newer backup from mozy

Maybe then things will be slightly back to normal . . .