Man that was tiring. When server is down, it really stresses me out.

The random weirdness of Seagate FreeAgent which was the usb drive for the mirrors finally caused filesystem corruption on gambit (Inigo's main server). It was crawling along and finally decided to kernel panic over the weekend.

I always have at least a gmirror software raid on any servers, for times like this. Recovery was rather simple, when gmirror is not loaded, you can mount either of the mirrored drives as normal FreeBSD partitions to restore. My only catch was that the live fixit filesystem refused to load from the built-in DVD combo drive. I eventually figured out out that my trusty IBM USB combo drive boots and works fine.

You can find out more on how to setup a simple gmirror RAID-1 setup with FreeBSD here:

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2005/11/10/FreeBSD_Basics.html

Backing up and restoring to another external USB hard-drive, showed that it's not entirely FreeBSD's USB stack at fault, but most likely something do with the Seagate drive. It's not fast, but there were no wierd kernel panics the whole time.

Which brings us to another point. Mirror services will be temporarily unavailable until we get a new USB drive (most likely 1TB) as even the 500GB drive was filling up. Since it's just a mirror, it's unlikely that it will be back up until end of February.

For those hooked on http://planet.foss.org.my, you can get your fix again now.