Blog:

Back up FINALLY

Ok, so....the site's been down a couple of times in the last few weeks.

The first one was completely Cablevisions fault.

6 hours on the phone in total with them, swapping out my cable modem and going over everyrule in my firewall, magically, my service started working correctly again.

Then last Wednesday I was unplugging a portable drive and I accidentally pressed the power switch on the power strip. Well, my home brew SAN (storage area network) was on that strip.

Well, you might ask "Why wasn't your SAN plugged into a UPS?"

Answer: the power strip was.

This leads me to two possible conclusions.

1) I have too much stuff on my UPS.

or

2) I shouln't have been an idiot and flipped the power button.

Well, I powered back on my SAN and was checking to see if I could reconnect to the iSCSI targets I have several servers pointing to to mount volumes on the SAN.

None of them worked. Not a single one.

SO I flipped over on the KVM to my SAN and the SAN software I was running on top of Windows 2003 Server to make the volumes iSCSI targets was reporting the volumes as unformatted or corrupt.

WHAT THE HELL?

So, I leave for work in a huff because everything is on than SAN. EVERYTHING. And the only backup that was recent as of the night before was the portable drive I stuffed in my bag to take to work.

So, I get home and began researching the issue. It turns out if you run SAN software to make volumes on a Windows server available as iSCSI targets, anti-virus software and even Windows itself will still attempt to write or do things to the drive, causing corruption. You apparently have to remove all permissions on the drives except for SYSTEM and Administrator with DENY for everything.

What a crock!

So, I set out to redo the entire thing. I bought new hard drives and began rebuilding. I was looking at the FreeNAS solution built on FreeBSD. It's supposed to allow you to create iSCSI targets. I've used FreeNAS in the past and it worked well for me. But this was simply as a share or FTP server, not and iSCSI target server.

Long story short: it didn't work. At all. Nill.

Back to the drawing board.

I eventually came acrossed OpenFiler built on Linux. I figured, what the heck, it can't hurt to try. So I downloaded it, made the ISO, installed and presto, it worked. Wonderfully. And it even locks the iSCSI target volumes out from the system so they can't be corrupted.

Sweet.

So in the end I have a 1.25 TB SAN and all my junk and websites are restored.