• Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Enabling RAID Mirrors Redux

    When new versions of operating systems come out sometimes articles need to be updated. It’s always nice when someone else does the hard part. Recently, Ben Levy, an Apple Consultant from Los Angeles, did some work on an article I did awhile back. To quote Ben, the new procedure is to: 1. Boot from something other than your intended RAIDed boot drive, open Terminal and use diskutil list to identify the relevant disks and partitions. 2. diskutil appleRAID enable mirror disk0s2 – (assuming correctly identified slice, yours may be different) This command turns your primary disk into a RAID mirror without a mirror 3. Reboot back to your boot drive…

  • Kerio,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Xsan

    6TB of Hot Swappable Drives for $600

    IcyDock makes a 4 port chassis for SATA drives that allows you to build your own RAID out of large and inexpensive drives. The resultant JBOD can then be formatted into RAID0 or RAID1 (software RAID) and presented to backup applications (ie – Retrospect) as offline storage. Amazon sells an IcyDock, populated with 1.5TB drives for a total of 6TB, which is how I’m now snapshotting my VMs in my lab. I’m also using it as the backup destination for my home Kerio server.  Works nicely so far. You can also buy the IcyDock with no drives and likely populate them with 2TB drives, although I haven’t tested this yet…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Updating Firmware on Servers

    I’m often asked what I think of upgrading the firmware on servers and storage.  My answer there, if it’s a production box and it isn’t broken then don’t fix it…  What if you’re upgrading the firmware on a RAID or RAID card and the device becomes unresponsive?  There’s usually a reason to upgrade, but if you are not experiencing problems then why risk a potential outage if you do not need to?

  • Mac OS X Server,  Xsan

    Xserve RAID: Reset Controller

    Unmount any Xserve RAID volumes hosted by the RAID (especially Xsan volumes).  Press the reset button  on the back of the controller module for about ten seconds.  You should see the controller restart and then the controller should be reset.  Sometimes you need to reset both controllers.  You don’t have to reset the whole controller to just reset the password.  To do that, you can press the reset button for about 1-2 seconds and then try to authenticate through RAID Admin to reset the password.  By default the password to view the Xserve RAID, once reset is public and to edit settings, the default password is private.  By default the IP…

  • Xsan

    The Anatomy of a RAID

    Originally posted at http://www.318.com/TechJournal The acronym for RAID can often be misleading as it has had multiple meanings over the years. RAID originally stood for a redundant array of inexpensive disks. The acronym RAID is now also known as a redundant array of independent disks as not all RAID disks are inexpensive. RAID refers to a hard drive storage mechanism using multiple hard drives to share or replicate data among the drives. In some cases this can mean having data that is written to a single logical drive stored on multiple drives so there is redundancy of the data or RAID can be used to maximize throughput to drives by…