September 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Linux is Alright
There comes a time in every DBA's life when he has to admit defeat in one area or another. Personally, I've done it so much it's old hat for me, so here's another one.
For years now I've been ribbing my friend for being a Linuxhead. Then I bought a Buffalo Terastation NAS for my house. Well, to make a long story much shorter, I lost my array and all of my data along with it. After poking around for a little while my friend discovered that it was Linux-based. So he asked me if he could have a crack at recovering it. I said sure... I wasn't really looking forward to the $3K it would take to have it recovered elsewhere. And did I mention this array had all my SQL backups and other important docs on it? I really couldn't afford to lose everything on it.
Well, after messing with it off and on for a couple weeks, he came over last night with a solid game plan and got the array back up and I was able to pull pretty much everything off of it.
I don't know if something like this would've been possible on a Windows system. He had uncovered an entire world of guys who had hacked the firmware to do one thing or another and that's what allowed him to do his thing. So with things in the Windows world always being so much more formal, that type of hacking isn't as ubiquitous and I might not have been able to get my data back this easily.
Needless to say I'm now rethinking my backup strategies at home. I've got a few DBs that I can't afford to lose, but it's tough. I'm not a corporation so I can't afford fancy tape libraries and the like. Nor are any of the home solutions suitable for the amount of data I backup. I'm basically between a rock and a hard place. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do yet, but I can't take a chance on losing that stuff again.
And of course, it's times like these when I bring my new-found paranoia to work and see whether my enterprise backup strategy has any holes in it or not. This type of near disaster is good for you. It's like almost getting in a wreck for doing something stupid. You get to be reminded to be more careful without the hassle and pain of an actual wreck... good stuff that.
So Linux is pretty cool, and my friend Jim rocks!
Posted by Sean McCown on September 5, 2007 10:50 AM
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Glad you were able to recover (most?) of your data off the drives. Also nice to see a positive opinion regarding Linux. However, I am guessing that the problem was really brought on by your drive configuration? It seems, from a quick google for reviews of that unit, that it defaults to non-RAID storage. If you would have had the drives configured for RAID 1 or 5, then you would have had fault tolerance on your drives. If it was a failure of the controller/CPU/OS, then the drives would still be able recover by moving the drives to a new computer/NAS unit.
Posted by: Mark at September 5, 2007 01:14 PMI suppose you could learn to use some of those Linux technologies and solve your problem yourself with a cheapo box and a bunch of disks. (lvm2, samba, rsync (dirvish perhaps, hardlinking for sure), rdiff-backup perhaps, cygwin perhaps) The good part is that by relying on software you don't have to worry about hardware compatibility. (e.g. finding a compatible raid card replacement)
Or I suppose you could pay somebody like rsync.net.
Posted by: Karl O. Pinc at September 5, 2007 11:07 PMHi there.
We use a linux based backup server that serves us rather well at work.we typically backup 8TB of backups with no issues at all.
This is a linux box with software raid and uses rsync for fast backups.
Cheap.robust and dependable!
Posted by: Vikram Ranade at September 5, 2007 11:55 PMAn old PC stuffed full of disks is quite a cheap back-up solution. You can even have dual-redundant back-ups fairly cheaply just by using more than one PC or more than one disk drive. And Linux is the obvious O/S to choose, of course.
Posted by: David Legg at September 6, 2007 07:12 AMPerhaps you should consider backing up to optical media. BluRay burners and discs are on the market now, and hold an impressive amount of data per disc.
Monthly backups help a lot. And with linux, it's as easy as remembering to put a blank disc in the drive one day a month.
Give Ubuntu a try sometime -- you might just be surprised! (And you can boot into a full graphical linux environment right from the Ubuntu LiveDVD, without installing to your harddrive!)
Posted by: Kamilion at September 6, 2007 01:57 PMhey you can upload it on xdrive.com, they offer 5 gigabytes of free space for backup purposes.
This services is powered by AOL, so they are not the sort of hoster that disapears over night.
Now its time to wipe out Windows altogether and get you a fresh install of openSUSE or Debian.
Posted by: welcome to the dark side at September 7, 2007 05:17 AMI had a very similar thing happen to me. I now use a low spec x86 pc running ubuntu and a raid 0 array (using the built in mdadm app) made from 2 500GB SATA disks. The whole setup cost £200. I do remote backups from the office using rsnapshot. This took me a few hours to build and set up, and is incredibly resilient. It has been running (and making diff backups) for 15 months with no maintenance or down time. For situations like this there is, in my view, no equal to an "appliance like" linux system.
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