In 2012 I was up in Cairns as one of three instructors teaching a two-week course for new Navy personnel, on how to operate the Fugro LIDAR system & data-processing software.

On top of all the preparation & teaching for the course, I also had to deal with some issues with the portable ground system (PGS) server, which we were using to teach the course.

The PGS started dropping a (perfectly good) disk every day or two in the leadup to the course, and HP took their time in finding a replacement backplane.

While waiting for the backplane, I had to closely monitor the system & re-seat dropped disks immediately. This gave the RAID controller the best chance to re-build the disk before the next disk dropped out of the array. The array was only RAID5, so if a second disk dropped off before the first had rebuilt, the RAID would’ve been lost, requiring me to re-initialise the array & re-populate it with data for the course.

Red light = dropped disk, one disk after another. Ouch:

Eventually, the new backplane arrived and I was able to install it in the DL385. This was also a good chance to give the server a clean. Being part of a portable system which gets used in carpeted & dusty rooms, it had collected a fair bit of grime in the hard-to-reach places:

Here also are a few pics of the classroom, with Doug teaching some Fledermaus:

Once the new backplane was in, the server was as good as new.