First off let me thank Joe Seebok for making this happen.
So I had a chance to talk with what seemed to be one of the higher ups at the UB IT dept to get the whole technical story on what exactly happened to the missing hand histories at UB.
The first thing I was interested in hearing was the whole story with how it happened from a person who actually has a technical background.
I was told that they kept all of their hand history data on a single server running RAID 5( RAID – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ) and in a RAID 5 setup you can have 1 disk fail and still not lose any data and this happens all the time.
What I am told next is that not 1 but 2 drives failed at the same time, now this on the other hand is not something that happens often, In all my years I have never seen it happen without the server catching on fire or something. If this happened to me I would go and buy a lotto ticket because its a one in a million chance as well.
OK I guess I can get on board with that one in a million chance.
So next I am told that they tried to rebuild the RAID array. Then I was told that Red Hat Linux somehow rebuilt the array with 64k block sizes instead of 32k completely destroying the array…. WAIT, WHAT?…
First off, You cannot rebuild a RAID 5 array with 2 failed disks, its just not possible so why even do it and run the risk of ruining things even further.
Second you wouldn’t be rebuilding the array in your OS if your running a hardware RAID, you would do the rebuild in the BIOS of the RAID controller. (Now if your running a software RAID on a server with mission critical data on it then… just wow, that is a whole new level of stupid.)
Next is that if your RAID controller supports both 32k and 64k block sizes you would have to manually select what size you want to use. So this means that during the rebuild you would have to ignore your previous RAID configuration report and select the wrong block size.
I have more to come however I have to go and do some actual work for the people who pay me so I will finish this up later tonight or tomorrow morning (Depends on how late the home game lasts tonight)
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