The question came through Gmail chat with no subject line.
If you expand an array of drives in Linux, do you need to reformat the array?
It was followed immediately by, "quick question."
That was a pretty normal way for technical questions to find me. I had been working on Linux, storage, networks, and servers long enough that friends knew I would at least understand what they were asking. Whether I had the answer in that exact moment is a different question. The surviving chat does not include my reply.
Storage questions were rarely quick once you got into them. The answer depended on the RAID controller, the filesystem, the volume manager, the operating system, and whether the person had a backup they actually trusted. Adding a drive was the easy physical part. Getting the rest of the system to recognize and safely use the space was where it got interesting.
This was also the kind of work I was doing at Beatport. The store was a growing catalog of music files, previews, customer data, and all the systems around them. More tracks and more customers meant more storage. More storage meant another decision about how to expand without creating a larger problem.
I liked these questions because there was usually a real machine waiting for an answer. It was not theoretical. Somebody had drives, needed more room, and did not want to erase what was already there.
The old chat ends after three short messages. No final answer. No neat explanation. Just a friend trying to change a Linux array and asking the person he thought might know.
That person was increasingly me.