March 2007
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I am The Cyberwolfe and these are my ramblings. All original content is protected under a Creative Commons license - always ask first.
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Archive for March 1st, 2007

Mostly triumphant

Posted in Work on March 1st, 2007

I got handed a job from one of our other techs who’s out on personal time last week – add three drives to an existing RAID5 array. Not too much of an issue, right?

Except I’ve never done it before, and nobody else in the shop has done so on a Dell server (We like HP around here.) So, I dig up documentation and am feeling pretty prepared.

Day of the work, I beat my head against it for an hour and a half before throwing in the towel and calling Dell support. Turns out, we need to upgrade the firmware on the BIOS of the system board, the Windows drivers and firmware on the RAID controller before this can happen.

5 times. It’s ten revisions old.

Yeah – it was going to have to wait for another day, since I had already had their server down for 4 hours.

Fast forward to today: BIOS update went fine. Drivers had already been updated? Who did that, and why the fuck didn’t they upgrade the firmware? First firmware: won’t load. Shit. Try second firmware – it works! Cool. 2nd, third and fourth go fine also. 5th craps out. Well, let’s see how lucky I am…

Cool! It’s been upgraded far enough to to the reconstruction!
(over an hour later)
Cool-the reconstruction worked! Now to resize the partitions..
(almost two hours later)
…and it boots!

Run away quick!!!