News from December, 2017

Today between 12:30 EET and 14:30 EET the server was not accessible due to router replacement and change of IP addresses. Although, the replacement was planned and prepared previously, some unforeseen circumstances occurred with the configuration of the device itself as well as with the server.

The expected change with the replacement is better network performance for the increasing outer and inner traffic.

Last night while all students were celebrating, I spent replacing a failing Samsung 830 SSD on the server. The disk was so rotten that it's copy with dd took about 5 hours, which is why the server was offline somewhere between 2017-12-08 22:00 EET and 2017-12-09 05:00 EET. The disk started failing in beginning of September, but recently the number of reallocated sectors become extremely high and I started detecting bad sectors on some system files. The read performance had also dropped and during the copy it fell to 5 MB/s (!), which explains the fore mentioned slow copy of just 64 GB between the old and new SSD. The disk failed only after about 24 000 power on hours (i.e. about 2 years and 9 months), which is rather strange, but maybe this is the normal life span of consumer SSDs?

Anyway, the drive is now replaced with a brand new ADATA SU800 128 GB, which unfortunately is not yet in smartctl database (see ticket 954). The server is back online and fully operational.