Philip Fourie's questions

This morning a drive failed on our database server. The drive array (3 disks) is setup in a RAID 5 configuration.

While we wait for a drive replacement we are preparing for a recovery strategy. Users are continuing to work on the system, albeit very slowly (don't know why??).

How does one install the new drive - will the data for this drive automatically be rebuilt from the parity or is there another process we should follow?

Edit: This is a hardware RAID controller. (Thanks for the answers so far, appreciated)

I have a problem where I cannot completely download a certain file from a server.
The file is 1.9MB in size but only 68% is downloaded and then it hangs.

I tried and these cases, which failed:

1. Downloaded the file with HTTP
2. Downloaded the file with FTP
3. Moved the file to different FTP and web servers behind the ISA firewall
4. Tried with IIS 6.0 & IIS 7.0
5. Multiple download clients. Which included FireFox, FileZilla (on Windows) and wget (on Linux)

This worked:

1. Downloading other files from the same location on the server. Both bigger and smaller and in size than the original. FTP and HTTP worked.
2. Earlier version of this file (.DLL) works. It is as if the content of this file has an influence on this file being served.

Network architecture:

Client Machine -> Internet (ISP) -> ISA Server -> IIS 7.0

The only constants are the ISP, Cisco router and the ISA server. Is it possible that something is rejecting the download because of the contents of the file?

I am hoping ISA is the culprit... I am not a ISA expert is there somewhere I can look to establish if it is indeed ISA causing this?

Update:

1. Splitting the file into two parts with a hex editor results in one half of the file being served correctly and the other part not.
2. Zipping the file results in the file being downloaded successfully. However this is not an option for this particular scenario.
3. Renaming the file and its extension also doesn't work.

Update 2009/10/22:

It does NOT seems to be ISA that is causing this problem. We connected a laptop (running IIS) on an available public IP and still the file download to 68% before it hanged. The two remaining components are the ISP and the Cisco 800 series router. Anyone knows about an issue on the router perhaps?

We utilise both Windows and Linux server at our software development company.

One of the friction points with this setup is that we don't have a single sign-on solution. Being more of a Microsoft shop than a Linux one we want to authenticate against AD.

I read a couple of articles online and I understand this to be possible.

We are currently using the following services on Linux that requires authentication:
- git server (through SSH)
- Sendmail
- Apache web server currently using .htaccess files.
- SAMBA file shares

What I want to know is how practical is this sort of setup? Does it really work or is it error-prone?

We are planning to move some of our Linux services to a Windows platform. What is the equivalent solution on the Microsoft platform to setup a web cache for outgoing traffic?