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classic book radio

Linux LVM mirroring

[Today’s run: 3.5 miles]

We had an outage with our radio station playback computer over the weekend.  It was working OK on Friday night.  But on Sunday morning I could no longer talk to the computer over the network.

I went out to the shed and it was showing a ATA error on the console, as if a disk was no longer accessible.

I booted it into the startup screen and sometimes the two mirrored LVM disks would show and sometimes not.

After church and lunch, I removed the drives and blew out the carcass with compressed air.

Putting the drives back in, they were showing up in the setup display so I tried booting and it all came up.  I don’t know if it was the air blow-out or removing/reinstalling the disks or what.  This PC is from 2009 I think, it is plenty old.  And it probably is taxing the power supply to have two drives installed.

Then I went into the graphical disk manager and I could see that one of the pair of mirrored drives was not up to date with the latest changes, so I clicked the buttons to get things sync’ed again.  I also looked at the error logs for both disks and the disks showed up as working normally.

And it’s been running fine since then.

I’m going to look for another PC to have on hand in case this one goes away again.

My understanding of the LVM mirroring tools is not very good.  I’m glad to see the graphical disk tool seems to work pretty well.