[plug] thrashing hard disks

[Onno Benschop]

On Wed, 2004-03-10 at 18:35, Craig Ringer wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-03-10 at 15:09, James Devenish wrote:
> > In message <404EBC0C.1010209 at jensz.id.au>
> > on Wed, Mar 10, 2004 at 02:56:12PM +0800, Ben Jensz wrote:
> > > I just want to test some drives to see if I can get them to fallover
> > > at all.
> > 
> > Before doing a double-take, I thought you had written "failover" and I
> > was wondering exactly what lengths you would go to for testing purposes
> > ;-)
> 
> I've done similar things - when testing our current core server at the
> POST, I spent a happy week unplugging RAID disks unexpectedly, thrashing
> it in an attempt to get disks to misbehave, etc.

My only history with "failover" was asking a Novell administrator in
1989:
	"What happens if the server drive fills up?"

His answer:
	"Dunno, lets find out."

I wrote a four liner .BAT file that did (something like) this:

	:label
	copy a+a b
	copy b+b a
	goto label

I then filled the 'a' file with one character and started it off...

It took about 20 minutes, the drive filled.

The outcome:
        "Woops, Novell doesn't like that. Lets reboot and delete that
        file. Hmm, doesn't want to seem to boot. We'll need to format
        the system drive and start again."

Luckily for both of us the server was not yet quite in production and
the boss didn't scream too much. It did mean that the administrator
wrote into his code a check for disk space. (Good because the code was
running a container crane in Rotterdam Port.)

Onno Benschop 

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