Return of the Clone

Any time you can mash-up references from Star Wars into a blog entry title that actually applies to the content, it is a Good Thing.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I did a lot of infrastructure work on the computers that run in the house. Part of that work involved setting up a computer to be used by the kids that would also double as a file store for backups (1.5TB disk), upgrading the MythTv server to 0.21 and doubling its storage capacity to 500GB.

While I was at it, and since I had the space, I decided to set up a weekly rsync to clone ("mirror" is probably more appropriate) the myth video drives to the backup machine. I'm thankful for that now, as one of the myth drives died last night (250GB Western Digital). The drive was 3 years old and had spun more or less continually over that time. I figured its time had come.

I've ordered a replacement drive which should arrive early next week. Restoring things should be a simple (gosh, I hope!) as putting in the drive, formatting it, making sure fstab is happy, and then a reverse rsync. In the meantime, Myth is clipping along using what space is left on the remaining drive. It had to expire A LOT of stuff, but is doing fine now, except that it still tries to expire shows on the missing drive. (I wanted to make "phantom" reference here.)

I did go through the pains of removing the path of the broken drive from its storage group, as myth has a tendency to start recording shows in odd places if it can't find an intended storage group path. I had to drop down into sql to do this--I couldn't find a way using the UI that didn't involve deleting the entire storage group.