An adage for gmirror users

[Wojciech Puchar]

>>
>> or bad cables.
>>
>
> I'll have to try different cables sometime, you may very well be correct.

i had such problems many times. it always was cables or disk drive.
Disk drive - check with smartmontools from ports.

>> i simply have in crontab a script running once per hour:
>>
>> #!/bin/sh
>> /sbin/gmirror status|grep -q DEGRADED && \\
>> mail -s "gmirror failure" myphonenumber at mygsmoperator.pl </dev/null
>
> Surely you jest! You presume that I have access to cheap, unrestrictive
> communications technology ;) In the US, ISPs prevent clients routing
> their own mail and text messages are outrageously expensive with our
> cell carriers! Seriously though, that's a good idea. Maybe I could have

so just send it to your mail!

Actually - only one operator in Poland still work this way, and doesn't 
officially say it's supported.
And it's the only reason i still use it, as others are bit cheaper.

> Touché! I set up my mirror after my last disk started dying and I

How about regular backups?

mirroring is only protection agains downtime, not loss of data that, as 
you may lose data because of other reasons.
Like accidental deletion, someone cracking into, hardware failure causing 
reading nonsense from disk and then writing nonsense results to both 
drives etc. etc.

> realized I needed at least some minimal fault protection. Mirroring
> seemed expedient. My ideal situation would be additionally backing up
> things I can't bear to lose on optical or tape media, but as this is my

DVDs are not expensive. and usually really small part of disk space needs 
to be backed up.