On Tue, 2010-07-20 at 20:08 -0400, Robert Heller wrote: > > Which makes me wonder why would you ever shut it down in the first > > place? I sure would not wait a week on a disk replacement much less > > more than 24 hours. > > First of all WD was not going to send us a new disk unless we sent the > old one in first -- the disks are not in hot swap bays, so I had > 'remove' the bad disk from the RAID sets and shut down the machine to > remove it. Well, they would not even let you pay for it and overnight it to you then send the old one back for another drive so you could break even? It's an utmost priority if you have all common hardware to keep replacement disks on site no matter who you work for or company. > Second, we had a couple of power failures (yes, we have a UPS, but that > is only good enough for a graceful shutdown, not for an extended power > outage). Those happen no way around it beside generator power and plenty of backup fuel. > The machine was only shutdown because we *had* to shut it down. > > The server is not a 'critical' server, in the sense that it has to have > near 100% uptime. It is not public facing server in that sense. Well, I fired a guy that worked for me for that exact thing. Thing was he never had to shut it down to swap the disks. In other words I go nuts if a machine has to shutdown because I'm the one left explaining why. John