The tape vault.
I love to jury rig stuff. I hate to put jury rigged stuff in production.
That said, a while back we had to get creative.
We back up our linguistic information (and other stuff) to tape.
This requires 5 x LTO3 tapes a weekend.
One day we dismounted the Djell Powervault 124t jukebox from the rack to dust it out as our server room gets a lot of dust in it.
Sure enough suddenly the left side of the vault wouldn't work any more.
These tape vaults store 8 tapes on the left side, 8 on the right.
We had no backup tape drives, and no way to do backups if we didn't get this working.
After poking and prodding around, one of us discovered (I think it was me, but it was a while ago, it may have been one of four guys) that the LEFT side of the jukebox was technically identical to the right side... except for the plastic face frame.
Well, a few loosened screws quickly swapped the faceplates, and then, we were able to fully use only 1 side of the jukebox (which defaulted to loading into the side that was broken).... with the jukebox fooled into thinking the broken side was simply not used, we were able to do backups that night.
Since then we have a stand alone drive for emergencies, AND we have a SAN so we store to DISK first then to tape.
So a nightmare scare like not being able to backup, shouldn't happen again.
The tension was that in order to get a new tape backup here, would take us, (if rushed) a month due to shipping issues. We could NOT go a month without backing up...
It's that kind of thinking that really excites me... finding out how to fix a problem with what little resources you have on hand.
I LOVE that, but again, I wouldn't want to support something that was pieced together all the time.. so we do go back and fix it. the Jury rig should only be an emergency and temporary solution.
