scobi's questions

We have a very large Windows file store (several terabytes and tens of millions of files) that I want to keep in continuous replication over to another server, in as near to real-time as possible. I'm looking for options on tools that will make this happen.

So far I've come up with:

• Move it to a NAS or SAN and share the files. Won't work, not an option for us for at least six months.
• Use robocopy with /MON. I'm worried about the drain on replication source resources as it rescans the entire tree every cycle. (While /MON watches for file changes before triggering a new cycle, each run performs a full scan, and does not actually use the file change data.)
• Rsync. No better than robocopy.
• DFS. I've heard very bad things from people at MS about DFS for stores with millions of small files. Probably half our files are very small.
• Hybrid. Write my own tool or find one online that uses file watchers to target what files need to be copied. Though the buffer can overflow, so still run a nightly robocopy to pick up anything that was missed.
• Backup-based. Some kind of crazy scripted backup/restore thing where the backup software can do very fast incremental snapshots.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

A friend is talking with me about the problem of bit rot - bits on drives randomly flipping, corrupting data. Incredibly rare, but with enough time it could be a problem, and it's impossible to detect.

The drive wouldn't consider it to be a bad sector, and backups would just think the file has changed. There's no checksum involved to validate integrity. Even in a RAID setup, the difference would be detected but there would be no way to know which mirror copy is correct.

Is this a real problem? And if so, what can be done about it? My friend is recommending zfs as a solution, but I can't imagine flattening our file servers at work, putting on Solaris and zfs..

So we've all probably had this situation: you debug some problem, only to realize it was caused by a config change you made six months ago, and you can't remember why you did it. So you undo it and fix the problem, and now some other problem comes back. Oh yeah, NOW I remember! Then you fix it properly.

It's because you didn't take proper notes, you fool! But what's a good way to do this?

In engineering we have loads of software meant to help us detect and track changes. Source control, code reviews, and so on. Every change is tracked, every change requires a comment as to what it is. And typical engineering departments require good comments so that in six months when you're figuring out why you broke it like that, you can use a historical 'blame' feature or binary search builds to pinpoint the problem. These tools are very effective communication tools and historical records.

But in serverland, we have 500 different services, all with different ways of configuring them. And they don't always have a text format (consider setting permissions on a folder or altering the pagefile location) though they may have a textual representation.

In our environment, we check in what config files that we can into Perforce, but there are very few of those. Can't exactly check in the Active Directory DB..though perhaps a dump that could be diff'd...

In the past I have tried keeping a manual change log in our wiki, but it's super hard to maintain the discipline to do this (I know, not a good excuse, but it really is tough).

MY QUESTION: What strategies and tools do you use to cope with this problem of tracking configuration changes to your servers?

-- Update --

Note: I'm not looking for shared-note taking tools (I'm familiar with OneNote, etc) so much as automated tools specifically meant to help with tracking server changes. There's no comprehensive tool for tracking server config changes, but perhaps there are some for specific applications like GPO's.

Also I am very interested in specific strategies that you've found useful. "We share notes in Sharepoint" is pretty vague. How do you maintain the discipline? What format do you use to track your changes? How do you organize your change data? I'd really like examples as well as ideas.

Our file server just started mailing us about how its battery backup is draining and it's switching from WB to WT mode and so on.

I looked through its logs and found that it is configured to automatically do this periodically. It's called "battery relearning".

What is this for? How often will it decide it needs to do this automatically?

I searched the LSI docs and all I could find was the different status codes for the different relearning states. Not really helpful.

I have been running Ghost (not the "real" ghost, but the PowerQuest one - Norton Ghost 14) on three of my systems for over a year now and am very happy with it. Fast, easily configurable, schedulable, has compression and encryption..

I'd like to set up something similar on our servers at work. Full system images with incrementals added every few hours to pick up changes to Perforce, stored on a rotating set of 1TB USB drives.

Unfortunately, Ghost doesn't run on Server. We have very simple servers, just basic PowerEdge SATA rack servers. Nothing goofy. I'm certain that Ghost would be able to work on these fine, except for its little flag it checks to make sure it's not running on Server.

So I have a few questions:

• Is there a way to make Ghost run on these?
• I am also looking at the "real" Ghost, which is actually cheaper per-license (apparently), but does not seem oriented towards frequent incremental image backups. Seems really geared towards managing system images, which is not what we need. Not to mention very very complicated to manage. Am I wrong about this?
• What competitors are there that I can use? I've looked at Acronis but their software is very expensive.

I'm not interested in weird command line only utilities or solutions where I have to set up scripts to automate backups. Ghost is absolutely perfect, except that it won't run on Server. What can I do?

On a Vista laptop with a on/off switch for Wifi, turning the switch on will trigger a lot of activity, killing performance and causing a lot of hard drive grinding.

The problem appears to be the auto-starting of mobsync.exe, which in turn starts up wmplayer.exe, which in turn does some kind of scan of its full database.

Where are the configuration settings to prevent this? For someone with a lot of music on their system this can result in a huge performance loss when flipping that wifi on (say, right after a flight or after coming out of power-saving mode). Is there a group policy setting I can set?