“I am Tigger MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod.
I’m the only one.”

When a disk fails in a RAID array, the primary risk associated with replacing it is that another disk will fail before the replacement is fully populated. At which point you’ve lost all your data.

So you can understand my concern yesterday morning when, as I was walking into the computer store to buy a replacement SSD for a machine that had failed unexpectedly, I got email from a NAS reporting a failed RAID5 disk, and discovered that I had two servers to fix.

The good news is that the RAID array finished rebuilding successfully while I was rebuilding the server that needed the SSD replaced.

The bad news is that as soon as I finished the long drive home, I got email that the brand-new disk I’d just installed failed. Crib death is possible, but this time the GUI wasn’t responding reliably either, and a root shell on the NAS got hung when I ran dmesg. Which means it was the 5-year-old NAS itself failing, and the disks were probably fine. If I could get them swapped into an identical chassis. That part will have to wait until Tuesday, since while I could buy something today, Amazon Marketplace can’t get me a ReadyNAS Pro 6 on Labor Day.

I’d be more upset if the NFS mounts weren’t still working, allowing me to copy most of the data off to random free space elsewhere. I haven’t quite come up with 8.3TB yet, but a lot of that is archived logs that may have to wait.

Oh, and the original, unrelated SSD replacement? I’m still babysitting that one, too, since the system involved is a fairly gross hack, held together with twist-ties and bubblegum.

My holiday weekend is going just rosy, thanks. How’s yours?

Why is the Kindle edition of a 15-year-old Banks novel selling for $15.99? Why is the trade paperback of it selling for $21.59? And, why, for the love of all that’s Culture, is it currently #9 in Star Trek adaptations?

Mind you, I think $9.99 is a bit high for the other Culture novels, but Look To Windward doesn’t stand out as being worth 60% more than the rest. And it’s not like you let Amazon set the price.

Every copy I found of the song from The Jungle Book had embedding disabled, so please imagine this playing in the background as you appreciate the bearly-clad Hikari Agarie below the fold. Not Safe For Mowgli.

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Reading the JustHungry food blog, I discovered that there’s a serious shortage of butter in Japan. The author and commenters speculate on reasons why, but fail to mention the one I thought was obvious: import tariffs. After all, New Zealand is practically made of butter, and it’s a major trading partner.

Sure enough, dairy is a protected industry, and there’s a 35% tariff on imported butter.

Young Gangan has released their latest research paper on the stabilizing effects of looped ribbons on a dynamic system, with the support of Doctor Nekomu Otogi, NSFW.

Okayado’s Daily Life with Monster Girls isn’t the only recent entry in the genre. While his own series 12 Beast is more of a “high school student travels to fantasy world” story, Youkai Shoujo and Hitomi-sensei’s School Infirmary are closer to the mark.

This is not necessarily a good thing, but I’ll keep an eye on them.