RTCG Dirvish Install
2006-09-08 - It was a bad system drive (not used for Dirvish) that was failing and taking down/hard locking the server! Software RAID-1 isn't as stable as I once thought. The system just can't stand losing one of the drives. Speaking of failing drives, I have now had a 95% drive failure across those 18 Maxtor Maxline Plus drives (meaning all but one have 'failed'). That being said, there *MAY* be an issue with the powermax drive utility incorrectly giving a "drive failed - diag code" when a drive contains a 3Ware array signature on the drive. I'm working with Maxtor to reproduce/verify this issue. That being said be sure your 3Ware controller firmware, MB BIOS, and even your hard drive firmware is uptodate. Some hard drive firmware can have disconnect and timeout issues with 3Ware controllers. Couple those firmware problems with a software bug in a manufacturer's diagnostic utilities and your hardware might not necessarily be defective......we shall see.
At any rate, these drive disconnects and 'failures' *MAY* be responsible for the myriad of reiserfs filesystem errors that have plauged me. These reiserfs filesystem problems have caused me no small amount of heartache. It got so bad that I switched away from reiserfs because, as Mr. Foner has pointed out, reiserfs is bad-evil-bad. I am reposting Mr. Foner's article about the evilness of reiserfs so that it doesn't get lost again in the file-system-shuffle at MIT. Think twice about using reiserfs for your dirvish partition. You may never have a problem...but then again.....you may.
ReiserFSConsideredHarmeful - L. Foster
2006-03-15 - Well here we are almost a year past the start date of this documentation and the dang thing STILL isn't done. Someone needs to slap someone else silly for their lackadaisical approach towards this documentation. at any rate, I'm at a point where I need to document this locally and since it is already in progress over here....I thought I'd finish it then convert it to PMWIKI locally. 
I had been meaning to figure out a way to make the backups manage themselves but since I had not done it..I have been having to manually manage my expires. Having a default 1 year expire time prevents dirvish-expire from doing any good. I've been manually expiring my backups..what a chore. I finally wrote a script to ForceExpire a script to automate the process for me. As with all of the little scripts I've written...they do not reference the system dirvish config files to lookup the vault locations. Maybe one day (next year?) I'll get around TUIT and see if I can't rewrite them (ok...well I just went back and rewrote dirvish-backupconfigs -- so there). For now though, I'm going to put expire-rules in to place, backup my dirvish config files (with yet another little script I wrote to BackupDirvishConfigs) and update all of this documentation. BTW...I'm gonna switch to PM wiki syntax for now since I'll be moving this local. forgive the um...oddities.
2005-06-15 - Did I say sole focus? I meant sole focused in and amongst all the other emergencies. Well, I've made more progress, found some bad disks, and and still learning. Throughout my learning process, I have come to need to surgically remove files from my Dirvish backups. (My exludes were wrong and therefore I'm wasting disk space.) I've written two scripts since the last update to help me in my chores. One is used to email me portions of the status files every day. DirvishNotify would need to be highly customized by anyone else wanting to use it. My script to remove selected files and directories out of all backups in a particular vault is currently named [dirvish-prune] ( DirvishPrune ). I was hoping for something a little more bank/money related to stick with the theme. One suggestion for dirvish-tax was comical but not intuitive. *Note: I have no idea why I couldn't [force] dirvish-notify to be a link.
2005-04-04 - The following is a work in progress. As this is my sole focus until such time as this Dirvish setup project is complete, I will use this as a notepad/scratchpad as I organize then document a 1st timer's setup of this product. Thank you Keith for your presentation at the NTLUG here in Dallas --Richard
[Needs]
[Equipment]
[Setup]
[Configuration]