Doings

Well, I’m not sure when my last posting was, really. Anyway, I’ll bring things up to date a little here.

Workwise, it’s not been a great week or so. One of our research groups has, or rather had, two 4 terrabyte RAID arrays, one the off-line mirror of the other and situated at different ends of the department. One was used as the day-to-day filestore and was in their lab which had poor temperature control. The second was not used constantly, it was mirrored using rsync nightly with the other array. It also sat in a temperature controlled room at 19C. Both arrays showed up warnings on two disks (each) on the same night. During the next week I desparately tried to replace disks faster than they were failing (in both arrays). I failed. The first array failed on the Monday morning just over a week ago and the second one the night after as I was desparately trying to copy the most important data over onto another person’s array. The second array is currently at Vogon International for data recovery. The first array won’t hold its settings when I rebuild it. A total of 8 out of 32 Maxtor Maxline II 300GB disks have failed in the space of a week, their only common denominator being that they were built on either 22nd or 23rd June 2003. They haven’t even been running for the same length of time, the second array was brought into service about 6 weeks after the first.

Anyway, otherwise, my parents came down to stay the weekend before last. This had been planned a long time ahead of my Nan dying but it did mean that my parents were in the right part of the country to go up to Ilkeston for the legal paperwork to be done. Unfortunately, due to the solicitors failing to tell my Dad that they were to meet at their Derby office and not their Ilkeston offices (with which we had always dealt before) he was unable to start the probate process on that Friday.

They decided that they might as well stay for the rest of the week until my Nan’s funeral.

Friday was that day, we drove up in the morning and met with the rest of my family at my Mum’s cousin’s house up there before going off to a pub for lunch and then the ceremony later in the afternoon. It was one of the few times when my family gets together these days. In the long distant past it was traditional to have a big gathering at Christmas, my Mum, Dad, Nan, my Dad’s brother, his wife (who’s also one of my Mum’s cousins) and their three children, Andrew, Ian and Karen. That tradition sort of died in the late ’70s.

After the funeral we had to meet the solicitor for the paperwork which had been postponed from the week before. This was illuminating for me anyway. For a start, I’m not going to see any of the money I’m going to inherit for at least 6 months.

Anyway, that’s about it really.

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