This is a reminder that we will be doing some fairly extensive maintenance on Iglulik, which is the server that hosts ftp/www, ubuntu, debian, and mint virtual machines, the MariaDB database, and /home directory partitions.  As a consequence all services that require any of these facilities will be unavailable for a number of hours.

     I am going to be:

     1) Replacing another failed drive in the RAID array that houses /home.  This drive failed literally two hours after replacing it’s mate.  Both drives only have a handful of bad sectors (7 on the first, 2 on the second) but the firmware on these drives seems to be defective and not re-mapping the failed sectors even though there are two full tracks available for this purpose.  Had this not been used in a RAID array I could make the OS do it by adding it to the bad block inode but this does not work in RAID.

     2) Replacing the existing flash drive that the database is operating on with a larger but more conventional model that is fully supported by the Linux kernel so that I’m not forced to run buggy insecure kernels while I wait for the manufacturer to port the drivers.

     I will also be replacing with a much larger flash drive so I can move the root file system to a partition on the flash drive which should speed up boot significantly.  As it is now, it takes about five minutes for the OS to fully boot on this machine because of all the virtual machine start-ups.  The copying of this data is what will be the major time factor and I have no idea how long it will take so may be a couple of hours or might be five or six.

     This will also affect https://friendica.eskimo.com/, https://hubzilla.eskimo.com/, https://nextcloud.eskimo.com/, and https://www.eskimo.com/.  Incoming mail will be stopped to prevent errors due to unavailability of the /home partition during this operation.