General Stuff Update
If you have a HP R3000XR uninterruptible power supply, you can, technically speaking, hot-swap out a failed battery pack. However, when you pull out the old battery pack, the UPS will automatically go into bypass mode, and may not come out of it after you put the new battery pack back in, so you'll probably have to power down the UPS to reset it anyway. DAMHIK.
I'm actually still not entirely sure this UPS is behaving correctly. After resetting the UPS a few days ago, the battery pack stayed between 99% and 100% for several days, was just over 98% the last time I looked before today, had dropped to 55% charge by early afternoon today, and is barely above 50% now. I suspect our UPS has a fault; it appears to, after any reset, charge the batteries fully, keep them fully charged for a day or two, then start slowly draining the battery pack at a rate of one to two percent per hour. I'm writing an RRDtool-based UPS monitoring daemon right now to track the battery charge level.
babylon4 appears entirely stable so far on Solaris 10 u9, even though u9 is offocially an unsupported developer-only release. (Hey ... since I can't afford the price of an Oracle service contract, ALL Solaris releases are unsupported for me. What's the difference? At least this way I'm running on fully patched-up-to-date code.) I upgraded the zpools from v15 to v22 this morning and deleted the old s10x_u8wos_08a boot environment. At some point before the next full backup set (due the first Monday of October), I plan to reconfigure the main array from its current configuration of RAIDZ2 with four hot spares¹ to RAIDZ3 with one hot spare, then restore all the data to the array. This will add roughly 600GB to the available working set.
In the course of trying to clear emissions system errors to get it to pass inspection, we've replaced the gas cap and the fuel tank vent valve (a $175 dealer-only part) on the Baby Benz. It's still throwing error codes. No further news yet. Fortunately, Eisbär, the Volvo XC70, is all set and happy and registered and inspected and ... stuff.
This update's ended up ... rather less general than I intended, because I've first gotten thoroughly sidetracked, then spent most of the last four or five hours trying to figure out what's going on with the UPS.
(Hmmmmmm. I wonder if I can kick the UPS back into charging by disconnecting its line power for a moment...)
[1] I normally wouldn't use as many hot spares as this, of course. But the array was last reconfigured as RAIDZ2 across eight disks plus one hot-spare, after an early-morning three-disk cascade failure a couple of months after I brought the system up. When I later replaced the three failed disks, I didn't feel like reconfiguring the array again, and didn't have complete confidence in the remaining disks anyway, so I simply dropped all three new disks into the hot-spare pool. The array has been stable ever since that first rebuild, though, so I have good confidence by now that the three disks that failed were the only three weak disks.
This entry was originally posted at http://unixronin.dreamwidth.org/773287.html. That post currently has
comments.
You may comment there via OpenID even if you do not have a Dreamwidth account.