The CANDIS Blog

My hosting manager found out this cool info recently. DRAC cards are a pain when they do not work – which is not rare. They are very important and are only needed in rare circumstances. However if those circumstances arise – these cards MUST perform. I must say that the PE1800 and DRAC4 that we have, has been nothing but problems over the years. Other DRAC’s and other servers, no issues at all. We have even had this DRAC replaced twice already and it is still playing funny buggers.

DRAC RESET

Thought I should write something tech for a change!

It is golden week here and all are away on break. So instead of forcing a staff member to come back, I thought I would take care of some stuff myself.

My problems started when a client who has a large advertising cluster, was running their main statistics database (for click fraud detection) on a Dell 1950 with only 1 SAS 15K drive.

I had suggested that this node, not being redundant like the tomcat servers be individually redundant, so DRAC card, redundant power and RAID.

Anyway, some new blades, Dell 1955′s arrived for the cluster and I thought, well, lets save the client some money, image the old 1950 DB server and load it onto a new 1955 server?

I thought this would be simple with Acronis.

No it wasn’t.

It turns out that a 3.5 Inch 73GB SAS drive is not the same size as a 2.5 Inch 73GB SAS drive. So I could not write my system image to the blades raid 1 array of 2 x 15K 73GB SAS drives.

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