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classic book radio

Trouble with the radio station computer

[Yesterday: ran 10 miles; today rowed 45 minutes]

We had trouble with the radio station computer last Sunday and it kind of fixed itself in the afternoon and I went on with things.

But then today, I was actually doing some work trimming up some poems and the thing suddenly stopped talking to me.  So I went out to the shack and saw it was spitting out disk errors.

I had had the same issue last week, but when it started working again I looked at the disk error logs and everything looked fine.  So I was pretty much convinced it was the driver or maybe the SATA parts on the motherboard.

So today I swapped the drives into the machine which is doing our streaming.  And I got the same error.  Really.  One of the drives has gone bad to such a degree that it sometimes won’t even talk to the BIOS.

I have two drives and they are mirrored using Linux software mirroring.  So I haven’t lost any of my data.  I was able to get the system (the same old one I have been using) to boot off the 2nd drive and everything is working now.  I have ordered a new drive so that I can rebuild the mirrored set-up.

I was telling my wife, the way a “real” business would do this would be to buy a $20,000 disk array with hot swappable disks.  Since I’ve filled up about half of these 3 TB drives, I wish I had a 20 TB disk array.  But I don’t 🙁  so we keep moping along on the cheap with Linux dual-drive mirroring.

I don’t know if I’ve said it directly before:  Everything on the radio station comes off of the computer.  I don’t have  a studio or a microphone hooked to a mixer board.  So when the computer is out the station has nothing to play.