Slug-a-go-go

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been having some trouble with my slug. Back from my travels to India and the USA, I've tackled the job of changing the disks I use. After a lot of false starts, I found a useful article called "HowToSwapDrivesOnUnslung" which I followed, using a "live" disk of Ubunto "Fiesty Fawn", to partition my new drives and to copy all the data from my old drives to my new ones. To cut a long story short, when I plugged the new drives into the slug and powered it on all was well. I'm now running live on the new disks and I've dared to wipe the old backup disk. So far, so good. We'll see how well the slug stays up - it "feels" healthier - but I'm old enough not to trust my feelings on this.

For those with an eye for the detail, my slug is running Unslung V2.3R29-uNSLUng-5.5-beta, the old drives were LaCie 300728EK 250GB 7200rpm External USB 2.0 Hard Drive Design by F.A Porsche, and the new ones are Seagate 320GB USB2.0 External Hard Drive with 8MB Cache. The new ones seem to spin down after a period of non-use, unlike the old ones. I hope the new drives give more than a year of service.

Problems with a slug

I run a fairly large IT set up at home. Five or six computers - mostly Windows - a couple of wireless routers, a switch, a cable modem and a slug (NLSU2) with a couple of largish usb disks. The slug is my network file sever - essential when you have so many machines. I chose the slug because it was cheap, flexible and let me do automated backups.

However, it is not the most reliable of beasts. I've had lots of problems with backups falling over, and find that I often have to rebuild the file system on another Linux machine. Recently things have been getting worse. I think the problem is that at least one of the USB disks - probably the backup one - is going bad. So, I decided to replace them with some new disks. "It must be easy to upgrade the disks". One weekend later and I'm not so sure.

I got the machine to boot with the new main disk once - and not since. I'm now trying the backup disk. 236 GByte copied so far. I don't think I'll get to know the outcome until new weekend now as I'm increasing my carbon footprint again this week. I hope to blog from the N800 from India.