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I was about to ask a question at ServerFault, but I doubt it could be closed as off-topic, thus it would be better to ask here first.

In a brief my question would be asking for an advice on what could go wrong with ext4 filesystem on LVM on hardware RAID6 as I thought this particular setup was very robust and proved itself to be so for more than 7 years of replacing failed drives and all was fine. Recently however this system experienced a disastrous failure.

I analysed all the information I could gather (logs, course of events from memory, filesystem failure mode etc), but ultimately was unable to conclude, what exactly failed and most importantly why. I hope that given all this information in question body someone experienced could suggest a failure and the cause of this.

My concern is that on the one hand this particular question and answers might be relevant and useful, but on the other hand it is rather specific... kinda...

So the questions are:

  1. Is this kind of questions on-topic for StackExchange?
  2. If not - are there any ways to make this question on topic. Reword it or something?
  3. Is ServerFault the best site to ask it?
  4. If not - which is?

Thanks

1 Answer 1

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Assuming you provide all the relevant diagnostic information, I believe this would probably be on-topic for Server Fault. "Specific" questions, when dealing with errors, are usually useful for other people (because someone else might hit the same error message and be enlightened by the answers). Overly-specific questions are usually problematic when someone asks for, essentially, "homework help", or "please do my job for me by designing my entire infrastructure to these specific requirements".

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  • This is exactly my concern: wouldn't it be understood as if I'm asking to "do my job for me" but essentially it is not my intent?
    – PF4Public
    Commented Nov 21, 2017 at 23:41
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    We're OK with "I'm stuck on this specific thing"; we're not OK with "please do my whole job for me". My threshold for "too broad" is, "if I were still a consultant, and a client asked me this question, would I bother sending out an invoice for the job, or just chalk it up to goodwill?" If the former, the question is too broad. I know it's a subjective thing, and I was an absolute softie for freebies...
    – womble Mod
    Commented Nov 21, 2017 at 23:56
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    I think, I've got your point, thanks. BTW "I'm stuck on this specific thing" -- is exactly, what I feel.
    – PF4Public
    Commented Nov 21, 2017 at 23:58

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