Yesterday I went to CompUSA to buy a new PCI IDE controller – one of my external USB drives that I bought to perform networked backups of my colo keeps losing its mind, and I was thinking that it might be that the USB controller (either the interface card or the one in the external box) isn’t up to heavy data transfer, so I thought it might be good to move it “indoors” as it were.
I installed the controller and a 250Gb hard drive. The system found it at /dev/hdg – I guess I put it in the second of the two IDE controllers on the card. I made /dev/hdg a physical volume (pv) under LVM2, made it a volume group (vg) and put a logical volume (lv) on it for my mp3 collection. After I moved my mp3s from where they’d lived before, on /dev/hdb, I wiped /dev/hdb and made it part of the vg, and made another vg for the colo backup. Yesterday I also discovered the “--link_dest” argument to rsync, so I can keep several days worth of backups in much less space.
Tonight I’m going to rip that hard disk out of the external USB drive and put it on my currently eviscerated Windows machine to see if IBM/Hitachi’s “DFT” drive function tester can find any problems with it. If not, I’ll add it to the vg and increase the size of the mp3 lv.
Tomorrow my new colo box should arrive, unless UPS does their customary screw-ups. I’m scheduled to go out to the colo facility on Thursday. I’m going to move the old drives to the new box, and upgrade to the newest version of Xen. I’ve practiced upgrading to the new Xen on my currently eviscerated Windows box (that’s why it’s eviscerated, I had to put scratch disks in it) and it didn’t go well, but I think I know what I did wrong. I also tried a full install of Debian on the dom0, and was able to save the domUs when I tried that.
If that goes well, I’ll be up again in a few hours. If it doesn’t go well, I’ll bring it home and work on it overnight, and I’m tentatively scheduled to go back to the colo on Friday.