- <p>Once in a while my home server have disk problems. Thanks to Linux
-Software RAID, I have not lost data yet (but
-<a href="http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.raid/34532">I was
-close</a> this summer :). But once a disk is starting to behave
-funny, a practical problem present itself. How to get from the Linux
-device name (like /dev/sdd) to something that can be used to identify
-the disk when the computer is turned off? In my case I have SATA
-disks with a unique ID printed on the label. All I need is a way to
-figure out how to query the disk to get the ID out.</p>
-
-<p>After fumbling a bit, I
-<a href="http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-getting-scsi-ide-harddisk-information/">found
-that hdparm -I</a> will report the disk serial number, which is
-printed on the disk label. The following (almost) one-liner can be
-used to look up the ID of all the failed disks:</p>
-
-<blockquote><pre>
-for d in $(cat /proc/mdstat |grep '(F)'|tr ' ' "\n"|grep '(F)'|cut -d\[ -f1|sort -u);
-do
- printf "Failed disk $d: "
- hdparm -I /dev/$d |grep 'Serial Num'
-done
-</blockquote></pre>
-
-<p>Putting it here to make sure I do not have to search for it the
-next time, and in case other find it useful.</p>
-
-<p>At the moment I have two failing disk. :(</p>
-
-<blockquote><pre>
-Failed disk sdd1: Serial Number: WD-WCASJ1860823
-Failed disk sdd2: Serial Number: WD-WCASJ1860823
-Failed disk sde2: Serial Number: WD-WCASJ1840589
-</blockquote></pre>
-
-<p>The last time I had failing disks, I added the serial number on
-labels I printed and stuck on the short sides of each disk, to be able
-to figure out which disk to take out of the box without having to
-remove each disk to look at the physical vendor label. The vendor
-label is at the top of the disk, which is hidden when the disks are
-mounted inside my box.</p>
-
-<p>I really wish the check_linux_raid Nagios plugin for checking Linux
-Software RAID in the
-<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nagios-plugins.html">nagios-plugins-standard</a>
-debian package would look up this value automatically, as it would
-make the plugin a lot more useful when my disks fail. At the moment
-it only report a failure when there are no more spares left (it really
-should warn as soon as a disk is failing), and it do not tell me which
-disk(s) is failing when the RAID is running short on disks.</p>
+ <p>One week delayed due to DVD build problems, we managed today to
+wrap up and publish the first release candidate for
+<a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a> based
+on Squeeze. The full announcement is
+<a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2012/02/msg00001.html">available</a>
+on the project announcement list. Check it out if you need a software
+solution for your school.</p>