SNAP server formatted itself. Why?

BobSutan

BobSutan

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Apr 5, 2000
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I was adding user groups to a shared folder on our SNAP 2200 today, and immediately after I saved the share permissons it formatted itself. This is the second time within a year that two SNAP servers have formatted themselves upon adminstrative action. At no time was the disk configuration portion ever entered. The only thing worth noting is that we looked at the logs immediately following the fiasco and saw a ton of warning errors about SMB glitching with about a dozen or so users (its a Win2K AD domain).

The only saving grace is that we've been doing the SNAP to SNAP backup with another 2200 across the room (learned our lesson the first time). Its currently in the middle of restoring the lost ~87GB.
 
That's why we named our SNAP device CNN (cheap n nasty) it was from dictionary.com thersaurus :D
 
Its looking like the errors it was recieving may have overloaded it, so when I pressed OK after making my changes it may have been the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak. We're gonna get to the bottom of this one way or another. We do have a copy of the logs and we're gonna see if we can get permission tomarrow to get SNAP involved with this one. 2 mysterious formats in less than a year is simply uncalled for. Seeing as I'm the op that was at the helm when it happened I can affirm that nothing out of the ordinary was going on--was just adding plain old group permissions to a shared folder when it happened.
 
I kinda wish mine would reformat itself, the web interface has been totally unresponsive since I inherited it.

Lately I've been using a few of our recycled P3-500's with new IDE drives as temporary/standby/backup/spillover storage. Technically it's more points of failure, but the flexibility of working with an actual machine with a real OS on it more than makes up for that.

- Qualm
 
The worst part about it is we the hardware to do a mirrored 800GB (14 Drives) RAID-5 array. Yes, that's two 800GB RAID-5 arrays just sitting on the self. Meanwhile we end up using these pathetic 260GB SNAP servers dodging bullets on a daily basis.
 
Well imagine that. It reformatted itself today as I was copying the data back to it. This time it lost its RAID-1 setting and reverted back to JBOD, formatting them all.
 
Time to tell the bosses that it would take less time to build your RAID array than recover from another SNAP disaster :p

- Qualm
 
Hey Bob,
I'm editing a review that writer just sent me for Designtechinca. He never experienced any of this in his testing. Is this something that happened on other Snapservers or just the one? What has the company's support said to you? That's a pretty serious problem!
 
To actually throw something in, somewhat worth while, we also have had problems with our SNAP devices dying, randomly, I can't say i recall them formatting themselves, but I know a couple of them have completely died for us.
 
This is the second SNAP in less than a year to self-format. We did have it being backed up with the SNAP to SNAP software for teh SNAP servers, which unfortunately ceased working on the March 12, the day we were instructed to rename all of our network devices to meet the new network naming convetion. This however broke the backup and our SNAP guru is off on a business trip. Hopefully he'll check his email and let us know how he had the software setup.

And we did tell the higher-ups about this. That's why they're finally letting me copy the 87GB of data to our DELL Poweredge 1650 server's 136GB RAID-5. From there it will be fully backed-up to tape.
 
Tell your boss to throw those things away. Business data nowadays is too critical to trust it to those peices of junk. We've had a few used ones come into work and they're always dead.
 
The problem is we're just a sub-comm shop and don't run the network, which is why we can't have a full-fledged server on our segment. And since we need more than 10 concurrent connections setting up a workstation with a bigass network share is out of the question. That leaves us with using the SNAP servers or having our local users using the SAN across the LAN, which is out of our control. Then again, there is a reason they map the drives for the organization and users. For those that are wondering why they went with the SNAP its because the SAN just came online recently and the users are leary of using something "new and unproven". Go figure.

There's something to be said for the pain and frustration that can be inflicted by management with psychological and/or mental blocks.
 
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