Well, I have become less cheerful - Alfred is fighting me every step of the way. I finally figured out that I had to just let the RAID card do its format and leave it alone - for something like 38 hours! Large disks take a while to stripe, I guess. Hope I never have to replace 1 - it'll take 15 hours just to rebuild, during which time probably nothing else will do anything.
I finally got the RAID right, and started the maintenance tool to add the disk capacity - and Alfred went nuts and refused to talk to me. I have a bad feeling that I am about to get to scrap his motherboard, and demote his function to a single-processor machine that I have laying around doing nothing,which will tick me off as I have a couple more multiprocessor motherboards, but just don't feel like doing one of those agonizing swaps today, although I may change my mind. I really need to get this pup working and stable, so I can get the rest of the house's computers to cooperate and play nice - and start rebuilding my music library.
If anyone wonders, RAID is not what we use to kill software bugs - it is an acronym for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks - which means that it takes a bunch of cheap disks and rearranges the way data is stored so that the failure of one disk in the array will not result in complete loss of data. Really clever idea - the net is less space that is useful, but less likelihood of all of it getting to be useless at once. Unfortunately, I had been watching RAID arrays built with relatively tiny disks, and it didn't seem that it took that long to recover when a disk failed. I am using disks 50 times as big as what I used to watch, and forgot that things would take 50 times as long to recover and rebuild. We live and we learn.
So for now I have a server that works, albeit not well, and is useless by virtue of its refusal to talk to anything but itself. Time for a restart, I think. Time to put that old monster out to pasture. Time to put Alfred down.
Time to start building Arnold. I'll keep y'all apprised....
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