Server hardware stuff

[InsaneJ]

So I ended up ditching the second SAS controller and SAS drives altogether and replacing them with four new 4TB WD Red drives. Though not the fastest they are meant to be run 24/7 and with several drives in the same chassis.

The hard drive configuration is now:

• 4x 3TB WD Red in raid 5
• 4x 4TB WD Red in raid 5
• 2x 256GB EVO PRO SSD in raid 1

There are now about a dozen or so VMs running on these drives and everything is responding well en feeling snappy. Unfortunately Friday one of the new 4TB drives failed. Usually when a drive fails it's near the beginning or near the end of it's lifetime so it's not entirely unexpected. Because RMA can take a while I've ordered another 4TB WD Red drive and will be replacing the faulty drive some time soon. When the faulty drive comes back from RMA I'll keep that as a spare I think. Or perhaps I'll put it in my backup server. We'll see

[InsaneJ]

I've replaced the faulty 4TB drive and the array is now being rebuild. I'll keep the VMs that are running of this raid array offline for the time being to help speed up the process. This includes the Minecraft servers. It should be done when I wake up in the morning

*edit*
Everything is back to normal.

[InsaneJ]

It's been a year. Time for some server stuff!

I noticed there's been significant chunk corruption on the Vanilla 1.16 world. The shopping island has been wiped along with half of someone's base near spawn and my witch farm is also cut in half. The automatic backups only keep a week's worth of daily backups. I manually backup those backups to my own PC from time to time, but as posted in a different thread the disk I use for that isn't in great shape so I'm unable to restore the corrupted chunks. Those chunks have been automatically regenerated but all the work that was put into them is gone I'm afraid.

I'm currently working on setting up better backup facilities. A friend has provided a Dell workstation. I've bought four 4TB WD Red drivers, 48GB ECC memory and an Areca raid controller. The daily backups will stay where they currently are, on a 1U rack server at my place. On the new server I'll be doing weekly and monthly backups. Weeklies will be saved up to 1 month and the monthly backups will be saved up to 1 year. The new server will be hosted off-site at my friend's place. He's also generously paying for the electricity.

So all in all this backup server, or server for backups, which ever you want to call it, it going to cost me around 600 euro and a bunch of time to setup. If you're feeling generous and would like to contribute, there's a PayPal button on the home page

[InsaneJ]

I got a second hand Areca of Ebay and put it in the backup server to run the new drives in raid 5. When configuring the controller I noticed this:


Looks like the previous owner didn't factory reset the controller before sending it to me. It appears to be an old raid controller from Valve. Who knows, perhaps it was even used to serve game content to Steam users at some point.

[DOM]

HL3 confirmed!

[Jiro_89]

Oooooo

[InsaneJ]

Like I've mentioned elsewhere I've upgraded the server with three 1TB NVMe SSDs. Two of these will host the game servers on a raid1 array while the third will be used for Dynmap.

Right now the server is copying all the files over from the old virtual hard disks to the new ones. This will take a while so I'll just let that run while I do other things