It hasn’t been a good fortnight with a close relative passing away quickly from terminal cancer. The morning of the funeral I got a text message – no one could log in at TAFE, the Xserve was down. I ducked in and the server wouldn’t boot. There was nothing I could do so I told them I’d start the next day.

I tried the troubleshooting but the system just hung at the spinning grey circle and the grey apple turned into a grey circle. I quickly thought this would be the logic board. I grabbed a G4 and put the two hard drives in and the system reported RAID errors and wouldn’t boot. I booted from the Tiger DVD and used “Disk Utility” to repair the RAID. The system came up and was running OK, so I added the PCI 64-bit Fibre Channel card and got the students files back online. Great, it only took 9 hours to get it up and running.

The next morning whilst I was checking everything the system crashed! F**k!  The drives wouldn’t reboot at all. So it must be the drives, this time the RAID won’t rebuild. This meant I must be wrong about the logic boards. So away I went installing OS X Server again back on the other two drives in the Xserve. That took another full day and a half including setting up all of the accounts. I had to write and run a script to change all of the ownership settings of the students’ home directories. I finally got everything finished and the students were away working on final projects.

An hour later the server crashed Lots of swearing!!! At least it rebooted and everyone could access everything again. It just kept rebooting at random intervals with nothing failing in the logs. Well, I’m hoping that it lasts 5 weeks and then I can get all of the new systems set up when they arrive in a couple of weeks.