[auton-users] update on BigPapa

[Dan Pelleg]

An update on the NFS server situation. We are seeing more drive failures,
and indications that even more drives will fail soon. Thanks to an
incredible effort by Jacob over the last two nights, the NFS directory is
still online and is served from a backup disk array. We are working on a
purchase order for a new set of drives with which we will resurrect the
main disk array.

In the meantime, the directories are still there, and we still have
backups. If there is work you need to do, go ahead and use them. But you
should be cautious about putting single copies of new data on NFS: we are
increasing the frequency of backups, but should the backup array fail, we
have no way to serve the data until new hardware arrives. So it won't be
lost in the sense that you will never be able to access it, however in the
short term it will be generally inaccessible.

In the meantime, let's thank Jacob for keeping things running against all
odds. He literally stayed up whole nights.

Last note: we are shopping for new IDE drives. If you can share good or bad
experience about commodity IDE drives in the 120-250GB range, now would be
a good time to do this by way of posting to admin at autonlab.org.