On 22/05/2022 05:13, Bob Brand wrote:
Unfortunately, restore from back up isn't an option - after all to where do you back up 200TB of data? This storage was originally set up with the understanding that it wasn't backed up and so no valuable data was supposed to have been stored on it. Unfortunately, people being what they are, valuable data has been stored there and I'm the mug now trying to get it back - it's a system that I've inherited. So, any help or constructive advice would be appreciated.
Unfortunately, about the only constructive advice I can give you is "live and learn". I made a similar massive cock-up at the start of my career, and I've always been excessively cautious about disks and data ever since.
What your employer needs to take away from this - and no disrespect to yourself - is that if they run a system that was probably supported for about five years, then has been running on duck tape and baling wire for a further ten years, DON'T give it to someone with pretty much NO sysadmin or computer ops experience to carry out a potentially disastrous operation like messing about with a raid array!
This is NOT a simple setup, and it seems clear to me that you have little familiarity with the basic concepts. Unfortunately, your employer was playing Russian Roulette, and the gun went off.
On a *personal* level, and especially if your employer wants you to continue looking after their systems, they need to give you an (old?) box with a bunch of disk drives. Go back to the raid website and look at the article about building a new system. Take that system they've given you, and use that article as a guide to build it from scratch. It's actually about the computer being used right now to type this message.
I use(d) gentoo as my distro. It's a great distro, but for a newbie I think it takes "throw them in at the deep end" to extremes. Go find Slackware and start with that. It's not a "hold their hands and do everything for them" distro, but nor is it a "here's the instructions, if they don't work for you then you're on your own" distro. Once you've got to grips with Slack, have a go at gentoo. And once you've managed to get gentoo working, you should have a pretty decent grasp of what's going "under the bonnet". CentOS/RedHat/SLES should be a breeze after that.
Cheers, Wol
