Saving a dying server
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@scottalanmiller said:
@dafyre said:
If you are renting a dedicated server from a facility, you should be able to call their support and tell them what is going on, so they can replace the faulty drive for you (after you have good backups, of course!)
They don't have RAID, though. The colo should do that... but you'd be left with a dead system. I'm guessing no IPMI system either, if they didn't even bother with RAID.
His might not, but I just looked at the Fasthosts site and they advertise RAID 1 for their smallest quad core system. It's still $70 a month just for a desktop processor and 12 GB RAM.
Which sucks. If I pay that price today I get RAID1, so why doesn't he get it? (Unless he has a grandfathered price).
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@johnhooks said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@dafyre said:
If you are renting a dedicated server from a facility, you should be able to call their support and tell them what is going on, so they can replace the faulty drive for you (after you have good backups, of course!)
They don't have RAID, though. The colo should do that... but you'd be left with a dead system. I'm guessing no IPMI system either, if they didn't even bother with RAID.
His might not, but I just looked at the Fasthosts site and they advertise RAID 1 for their smallest quad core system. It's still $70 a month just for a desktop processor and 12 GB RAM.
Which sucks. If I pay that price today I get RAID1, so why doesn't he get it? (Unless he has a grandfathered price).
He said that it had no RAID at the beginning.
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@johnhooks said:
Which sucks. If I pay that price today I get RAID1, so why doesn't he get it? (Unless he has a grandfathered price).
Not related. Not like your server moves hardware on its own. It stays on what you started on. To migrate it would need downtime.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@dafyre said:
If you are renting a dedicated server from a facility, you should be able to call their support and tell them what is going on, so they can replace the faulty drive for you (after you have good backups, of course!)
They don't have RAID, though. The colo should do that... but you'd be left with a dead system. I'm guessing no IPMI system either, if they didn't even bother with RAID.
His might not, but I just looked at the Fasthosts site and they advertise RAID 1 for their smallest quad core system. It's still $70 a month just for a desktop processor and 12 GB RAM.
Which sucks. If I pay that price today I get RAID1, so why doesn't he get it? (Unless he has a grandfathered price).
He said that it had no RAID at the beginning.
I must have glossed over that.
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He said single drive. Maybe that is wrong If it is wrong, they should swap the drive ASAP.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
Which sucks. If I pay that price today I get RAID1, so why doesn't he get it? (Unless he has a grandfathered price).
Not related. Not like your server moves hardware on its own. It stays on what you started on. To migrate it would need downtime.
It won't move hardware, but you would be able to move the data. Which I guess you could buy another and move the data, but they could give you a free window to get that done.
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Another option would be for the provider to give you a few windows for down time. With a single server and a single drive, downtime has to be expected (well maybe not since there were no backups). Just a window long enough to bring the server down, and add a drive. I mean for what you're paying, you could have bought the whole thing outright in under a year.
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@johnhooks said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
Which sucks. If I pay that price today I get RAID1, so why doesn't he get it? (Unless he has a grandfathered price).
Not related. Not like your server moves hardware on its own. It stays on what you started on. To migrate it would need downtime.
It won't move hardware, but you would be able to move the data. Which I guess you could buy another and move the data, but they could give you a free window to get that done.
Yes, but that is something that you would have to do, not something that they can realistically do. I know of no provider that does anything like that.
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@johnhooks said:
Another option would be for the provider to give you a few windows for down time. With a single server and a single drive, downtime has to be expected (well maybe not since there were no backups). Just a window long enough to bring the server down, and add a drive. I mean for what you're paying, you could have bought the whole thing outright in under a year.
there are a lot of assumptions here. Whose hardware is it? if this was devops, this wouldn't be an issue. Things like that. So assumed downtime might not apply.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
Which sucks. If I pay that price today I get RAID1, so why doesn't he get it? (Unless he has a grandfathered price).
Not related. Not like your server moves hardware on its own. It stays on what you started on. To migrate it would need downtime.
It won't move hardware, but you would be able to move the data. Which I guess you could buy another and move the data, but they could give you a free window to get that done.
Yes, but that is something that you would have to do, not something that they can realistically do. I know of no provider that does anything like that.
I agree. That's what I mean, they give you a window on a new server for you to move your data.
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@johnhooks said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
Which sucks. If I pay that price today I get RAID1, so why doesn't he get it? (Unless he has a grandfathered price).
Not related. Not like your server moves hardware on its own. It stays on what you started on. To migrate it would need downtime.
It won't move hardware, but you would be able to move the data. Which I guess you could buy another and move the data, but they could give you a free window to get that done.
Yes, but that is something that you would have to do, not something that they can realistically do. I know of no provider that does anything like that.
I agree. That's what I mean, they give you a window on a new server for you to move your data.
With normal hosts you pay for this as the pricing is based on the options that you choose. if you don't need RAID, you don't pay for it. not their responsibility to provide services for your oversights.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
Which sucks. If I pay that price today I get RAID1, so why doesn't he get it? (Unless he has a grandfathered price).
Not related. Not like your server moves hardware on its own. It stays on what you started on. To migrate it would need downtime.
It won't move hardware, but you would be able to move the data. Which I guess you could buy another and move the data, but they could give you a free window to get that done.
Yes, but that is something that you would have to do, not something that they can realistically do. I know of no provider that does anything like that.
I agree. That's what I mean, they give you a window on a new server for you to move your data.
With normal hosts you pay for this as the pricing is based on the options that you choose. if you don't need RAID, you don't pay for it. not their responsibility to provide services for your oversights.
They don't give you the option not to have it though.
(that's the smallest quad core they offer)
So if they had the option to avoid it, then yes I agree with you that they are out of luck. However, if it wasn't offered previously, and now it's the default config and can't be changed then I don't think it's an oversight at all.
Edit: Oops I lied, that's the higher 4 core system. Here's the smaller one:
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server we are on is a DS710i which was launched back in late 2011 it seems - from what I can see it should have come with dual 1tb drives but for some reason we seem to just have 1.
so far the backup seems to have completed. a 7GB tar took about 1 day to complete. luckily they were taking regular backups of the db so not much to replay after the last backup on that gets restored.
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@larsen161 said:
server we are on is a DS710i which was launched back in late 2011 it seems - from what I can see it should have come with dual 1tb drives but for some reason we seem to just have 1.
How are you determining that you only have one?
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well, well, well....
Looks like when someone said there was only drive on there what was actually meant was only one drive was setup and in use. Another guy has been working on this but I just decided to jump on it and take another look at what is going on.# iostat -x 1 Linux 3.2.0-99-generic (server88-208-204-138.live-servers.net) 09/03/16 _x86_64_ (4 CPU) avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 4.05 1.77 1.31 46.05 0.00 46.82 Device: rrqm/s wrqm/s r/s w/s rkB/s wkB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz await r_await w_await svctm %util sda 3.53 20.35 21.25 10.70 1363.54 368.05 108.39 25.83 808.39 105.71 2204.51 28.08 89.73 sdb 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.01 0.00 9.32 0.00 0.52 0.52 0.00 0.52 0.00 dm-0 0.00 0.00 22.84 18.10 1355.16 320.84 81.86 29.63 723.51 156.72 1438.68 21.91 89.72 # fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x0008e4c8 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 2048 499711 248832 83 Linux /dev/sda2 499712 8499199 3999744 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda3 8501246 1953523711 972511233 5 Extended /dev/sda5 8501248 1953523711 972511232 8e Linux LVM Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table Disk /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00: 995.8 GB, 995849404416 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121071 cylinders, total 1945018368 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Disk /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 doesn't contain a valid partition table
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@larsen161 said:
well, well, well....
Looks like when someone said there was only drive on there what was actually meant was only one drive was setup and in use. Another guy has been working on this but I just decided to jump on it and take another look at what is going on.# iostat -x 1 Linux 3.2.0-99-generic (server88-208-204-138.live-servers.net) 09/03/16 _x86_64_ (4 CPU) avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 4.05 1.77 1.31 46.05 0.00 46.82 Device: rrqm/s wrqm/s r/s w/s rkB/s wkB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz await r_await w_await svctm %util sda 3.53 20.35 21.25 10.70 1363.54 368.05 108.39 25.83 808.39 105.71 2204.51 28.08 89.73 sdb 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.01 0.00 9.32 0.00 0.52 0.52 0.00 0.52 0.00 dm-0 0.00 0.00 22.84 18.10 1355.16 320.84 81.86 29.63 723.51 156.72 1438.68 21.91 89.72 # fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x0008e4c8 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 2048 499711 248832 83 Linux /dev/sda2 499712 8499199 3999744 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda3 8501246 1953523711 972511233 5 Extended /dev/sda5 8501248 1953523711 972511232 8e Linux LVM Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table Disk /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00: 995.8 GB, 995849404416 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121071 cylinders, total 1945018368 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Disk /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 doesn't contain a valid partition table
Oh geeze. Who set that up? Are you expected to set the RAID up yourself?
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They forgot to RAID it!!!
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I saw this thread ages ago, but when I saw forgot to raid it, I re-read the OP and then saw Fasthosts.
Yeah....they play VERY fast and loose with their customers. RUN AWAY screaming your head off if you can. This won't help you immediately but get anything you have with them into another provider as quickly as possible.
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it's now moving over to AWS where the rest of the companies servers are. this started with one small local project many years back outside of the main dev/r&d team at hq and grew to host more systems for not only our local uk team but those in all our other offices in the us, ru, & il.
Fasthosts are being quite responsive and helpful. This is the latest from them once I said why wasn't this configured with hardware RAID from the start.
"A DS710i will have had raid configured, unless the server is of certain flavours of Ubuntu, which don't support software raid in a stable manner. Your older server is Ubuntu 12.04, which is one of those affected builds.
Your other server has hardware raid configured, I believe.
Based on your screenshot, only one drive was configured at all - /sdb contains no partitions. I assume that this means the performance issues are purely due to issues on /sda. As this contains all of your data and system files, replacing this will require a rebuild of the server. Following that, we can connect the existing disk for data recovery"
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@larsen161 said:
"A DS710i will have had raid configured, unless the server is of certain flavours of Ubuntu, which don't support software raid in a stable manner. Your older server is Ubuntu 12.04, which is one of those affected builds.
That makes no sense. You get hardware RAID... unless you need it. You clearly needed it, so you didn't get it?