Over the weekend, I did some maintenance on one of our servers. There were a few discoveries, and I have to admit that I am disappointed in myself for not discovering these things until now.

Over the past few weeks, I was hearing the tell-tale signs of a failing hard drive with the funny clicks and such. Running check disk confirmed there was a problem. I wasn’t too worried about the immediacy of the problem because I had been told by our previous contractor that the drives were mirrored and that the backup solution would work. Also, I had a replacement drive ready to be deployed.

I set up my schedule to be on site last Saturday (the 12th) to work on the server. It wasn’t long before I figured out that the drives weren’t mirrored at all, and in fact the supposed mirrored drive wasn’t even connected to power. I booted from that drive and discovered that it hadn’t been in use since 9/2006.

The backup system we are using is a $2,200 solution provided by our previous contractor that is a linear array of 4 500GB HDDs. (Ironically, also purchased in 9/2006) Each night, the server sends an image of it’s hard drives to the array located on the other side of a fire wall way on the other side of our building. Recovery is done by booting the server from a Linux restore disk. The disk failed to connect to the backup server using all methods I tried, but I verified that communication existed between the two. I found no helpful information about the specific error message on the 241 page manual, on Intel’s FAQs, or on Google. I will be contacting our previous contractor about this and also pursuing the Intel support department as to why we were unable to restore a backup.

In the end I used a tool to clone the existing drive to the new hard drive. It was done within 20 minutes. I then had to wrestle to get the drive letters back to the original assignments (and this took a lot of work for me). In the end, it was as simple as booting from a Windows 98 boot disk and running FDISK /MBR.

The moral of the story is to check and recheck your backup strategy to make sure you’re not left stranded.  If the disk had actually failed, I would have been in a world of hurt and the church would have been forced to fork out a lot of money to fix the problem.  So, I’m a dope, but I learned an invaluable lesson from this adventure.

For our backup strategy, we rely primarily on our Intel Storage System SS4000-E. I have read a lot on blogs and in magazines about backup solutions and strategies, and I am so comfortable with this solution. Still, I have nightmares about loosing a server. We’re not using tape any longer

See, the SS4000-E is my hero because every night she takes an image of whichever hard drive on the network I want her to (with appropriate client software of course) and saves them on her 2TB array.

We are also FTP’ing the nightly backups of our ACS database to a server out of state. Since that data is really the most mission critical data we have, I wanted to make sure we’re keeping it off site.

What do you think? Is this a wise solution for backups? What do you use in your organization?

So, I’m showering this morning, (already TMI, I know) and I have this dream of the computer of the future. Like any other bona fide nerd, I’ve always drooled over high powered machines, and I couldn’t help thinking about how far technology has advanced in my lifetime. I remember surfing BBS’ with my 9600 bps modem on my speedy Windows 3.1 machine boasting a 16 MHz Intel 386 processor. Yes, I remember the roomy 100 MB hard drive that we never thought we could fill up and the 4 MB of RAM.

Now, a mere decade later, personal computers are starting out with 2 GB of RAM. According to my math, which is decidedly poor, we have entry level machines today with 51,100% more RAM. So, if our entry level machines in the next decade make the same advances, we’re looking at 1 TB of RAM standard and 1 exabyte hard drives. Friends, let’s toast to the future. I’m salivating right now.

My curiosity though is why our brand spankin’ new machines don’t really feel much faster than before. See, my XP Pro machines work great with 512 MB of RAM. Not so with Vista. Now, if we’ve made so many advances in hardware, why can’t we equally increase the efficiency of our software? I have some sneaking suspicion that the leading software company is in cahoots with some of the leading computer manufacturers to coerce the unsuspecting masses into upgrading their PCs.

While I doubt that we’ll see (m)any of these designs in actual production, it is interesting to see the creative ideas that people come up with.

Pictured is the “Bloom,” entry #908 in Microsoft’s 2007-08 Next-Gen PC Design Showcase.

Head on over; check out some of the imaginitive designs; and vote for your favorite.

• Link: Next-Gen PC Design Home
• Link: 15 Offbeat Computer Designs

I’ve been thinking about Asterisk for a while, considering replacing our PBX with Linux. I love Linux, and I love it’s affect on the church’s budget. Jon posted about linking Asterisk to their ChMS, and I got a ton more excited about it. That is simply useful, and I can imagine the days of volunteers and ministers becoming dramatically easier because of it.

Well, my find of the day was this video tutorial from Systm on how to set Asterisk up (actually posted back in 2005). IMHO, it’s 45 minutes well spent.

Well, it makes me want to get it set up in my home. Woot!