It's Just Degrading

Today has been a long one. I was working at my desk, on a server in a distant land, and about to have a team meeting, and then, the text message comes. "Meet me in the server room" Hm... I haven't received one like this before. Then a second, "I just got a call from security".

With this, myself and two others are expedited to the server room. As we arrive, we just hear this noise going off inside. After taking apart the server, looks like our raid array has been degraded as one of our drives has failed.

The bad thing is, this server is so old, that we are afraid to try to rebuild. If we do, it's very possible that the whole server can just crash and then we might lose everything. So, our first thought is to make a backup, while we still can, of everything on the server. Although as we attempt to do so, we discover that the dvd drive is broken. It won't close.

I find a server that is the same model, and attempt to switch out dvd drives, only to discover that for the life of me, I cannot get this drive out of the server case. I call another admin to come take a look at it, and 20 minutes later, we're still unable to get it out.

I end up placing the second server right next to the degraded server, and run a SCSI cable from the degraded server, into the dvd-drive of the other server. Finally, it looks like we're able to back this up. But then we learn more...

This server is an extremely old server. It was donated by a team who no longer needed it, and we decided to turn it into a file server for everyone. However, this server is so old, it doesn't even support USB 2.0. To backup all of the information on this server would take atleast the entire night, and possibly some into the next day.

Our only other option is a network backup. We create a new share on another server. We then load Acronis, and tell it to prepare a backup of the entire system. We were successfully able to get it to see the newly created share, and we begin its dump.

Yup, the degraded server has only a 10/100 NIC Card. So, it won't be gigabit speed, but it is faster than USB. The full backup is going to take about 9 hours. Looks like it's going to be an early morning for me in the office.