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[ProgSoc] Programming activity - raidreconf



 Yes, a genuine opportunity to engage in a programming project.

 It's not that important that it relates to a need I have right now to
 resurrect some data.  What is important is that it's an opportunity
 to fix up a truly dodgy piece of C code that would be infinitely more
 useful to infinitely (well, finitely) more people if it didn't bork
 at any and every error.

 raidreconf is a utility that can grow a software RAID5 array from
 x to (x+1) disks.  It does this by completely re-writing every bit
 of data on the array onto the new array (which is mostly the old
 array).  You can easily begin to see the complications and dangers
 that this involves.

 What's *really* bad is if it hits a read-error on one of, say, four
 300GB drives at, say, 90% of the way through the process.  And then
 just dumps core and bids you good day.

 I've had a look at the source, but it's been years since I've tried to
 wrap my head around someone else's code .. particularly stuff that
 works on this level.  Having said that, it doesn't look like it'd be
 all that hard to fix up the error trapping on - and handle things
 more gracefully (say, for starters, by not munging 1TB of your
 data when it discovers a single block that it doesn't like).

 Even a mod that allows you to kick off the process at some arbitrary
 point (say, the block after where it failed) would be really handy
 right now.  There's an awful lot of interesting German documentaries
 that would otherwise be very difficult to re-acquire, somewhere on
 those five disks.  Failing that, money may even be involved .. if
 you want to check the source and come up with a rough quote, that'd
 be useful, too.

 Jedd.

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