[clue] Ack! (recovering busted disks)

[David L. Anselmi]

Mike Bean wrote:
> We have a fairly major system at work that somehow lost track of a disk
> ALERT! /dev/disk/by-uuid/(some id) does not exist.  Dropping to a shell

Here's a Debian bug that describes this symptom. Maybe the cause is similar.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=741342

> Must admit, my google-fu has failed me.  I have no idea.  I have a snapshot
> I can revert to, but it's an old one, and the users will lose allot of
> their work.

That sounds negligent to me (perhaps even in the legal sense). Snapshots != backups. There are two 
kinds of people in the world... Etc.

Do the users at least know that their data on that machine will disappear one day?

Once there was a windy ice storm that caused arcing on the power lines out to DIA. They have 2 feeds 
but the lines are set up the same way so both arced, tripping their breakers, and the airport was 
without power. So supposedly things like ILS and radar have backups but things like bag check 
computers and security check point scanners and computers don't.

The quote from the DIA spokesperson was, "we've lost power to some critical systems". My thought 
was, if you've lost power then they aren't critical. And in the sense of ground related impacts 
causing death they weren't.

So your system might not be critical. But without backups it might not qualify as useful either. 
Sure, I've worked in the defense business so I can understand that your hands might be tied. But you 
could at least put up an MOTD warning, couldn't you?

Dave