[monolith-users] Monolith disk troubles

[Leif Nixon]

Dear Monolith users,

In our continuing saga of storage problems on Monolith I can
present the next installment; "the failing RAID set strikes again".

Yes, I am afraid the /disk/global file system has broken down, again.
This time the file system was damaged beyond repair, so all data on it
has been lost. I can only, once more, offer our sincere apologies.

Since /disk/global is only intended as a temporary storage area, there
are no back-ups made of it.

Ironically, we had a number of improvements planned to avoid these
kinds of problems, but this crash came before we had time to implement
the planned changes.

Some of the less time consuming changes have been made now; the new
/disk/global file system is smaller (1 TB instead of 2 TB), and the
underlying file system type has been changed to reiserfs. This should
improve stability and performance, respectively.

Then, at a later date, another file server will be added to Monolith,
and approximately half the users will be migrated there, to share the
load. We will get back to you on this.

On a medium to long term scale, we are investigating alternative
storage solutions.

Monolith is now on-line again.

-- 
Leif Nixon                                    Systems expert
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National Supercomputer Centre           Linkoping University
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