[cobalt-users] 3i->550 external disks

[josh <josh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have been having some trouble, perhaps related to external disks,
but I suspect more related to running the 550 OS on a RaQ 3i with two
9GB external SCSI drives. I had a little bit of trouble adding the
drives at first, but then I was able to just add them through the web
interface. SCSI drives have always been mysterious so that's not that
odd.

These three lines show the /etc/fstab entry for the two scsi drives and
an entry I added for a remotely mounted NFS disk.
 
/dev/sda1	/vol/.sda1	xfs	noauto,usrquota,grpquota,osyncisdsync	0 0
/dev/sdb1	/vol/.sdb1	xfs	noauto,usrquota,grpquota,osyncisdsync	0 0
gallant-fox:/homes	/homes	nfs	defaults	0 0


My beliefs are that the Active monitor programs and trying to monitor
the SCSI disks and doing a poor job of it, from time to time causing
the system to reboot. Also, if I unmount one ,I believe it causes my
system to reboot.

Does anyone have any experience with adding SCSI disks (or using the
interface for anything) with a RaQ 3i and the 550 OS. Can I simply
remove the disks from the web face and then remount them manually
without losing data? Since the entry has "noauto" -- I believe they
don't get mounted until the web interface does it, but I am still
relatively new at this. I tried to unmount one and run fsck (e2fsck
actually) on it and I could not. It is an xfs file system but when I
try to use any utilities I get complaints about the block. Are there
some options I need to know or some other utilities I should be using?

Some other beliefs I hold are that a single drive failing should not
bring down the system. Why would this happen. One of them is just
pieces I saved as backup and the other is now being used exclusively
as squid cache space.

-- 
Josh Kuperman                       
josh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx