Getting a cluster....

Well, after this weekend I believe that the powers that be will provide 
some funding to get a cluster... I'll try not to make a short story long, 
but I'm writing this at 4:30 AM.

Sometime Friday evening (probably around 11:30ish) during the BRMS save 
our Domino server experienced a hang. Well, nobody reported this until 
about 10:30 Saturday morning. I happened to be packing up to head back 
home from a quick Thanksgiving beach vacation when I got the call. My 
manager came in at that point and started to analyze the situation. After 
trying to rebuild our two disk drives that showed up failed, we ended up 
seeing that there was a damaged object causing the drives to not rebuild. 
Well, IBM couldn't help us locate the object - the error message had a 
blank field for the object name but we saw that QNOTES was the owner. 
After desperately hoping this would work after many restarts of the 
rebuild, we decided that we would try to just reload the system. Well, 
with 2 failed drives (in different parity sets) the system just would not 
IPL to allow us to do ANYTHING. It was then we realized that we would have 
to reload the entire system.

We decided to do two things at this point. First, we decided that with 
many of the drive problems we experienced that we would just get rid of 
the eStorage drives and purchase all IBM drives first thing Monday 
morning. This will get rid of some of the finger-pointing from the two 
parties. Second, we decided that we would just start the system reinstall 
on a backup/DR iSeries that we have for our production legacy app iSeries. 
I started all that at about 6:30 PM Sunday and just now at 5:00 AM Monday 
it appears that I'm pretty much good to go. I'll have some other things to 
work on, so we will see how the rest of the day plays out.

Gotta love computers...

Chris Whisonant
Comporium
Senior Mid-Range Systems Administrator
IBM eServer Certified Systems Expert - iSeries Technical Solutions V5R2
IBM Certified Associate System Administrator - Lotus Notes and Domino 6
803.326.7270 | 803.326.6142 fax