The servers were named Steve and Barry.
Each one had four drives. The root system stayed on the first disk. The other three needed to become a software RAID array.
One machine worked as expected. The other insisted a disk was busy even though there was no partition on the device. An old device-mapper setting had created a phantom layer that needed to be removed before the drive could join the array.
That was the kind of problem that turned a short task into an investigation.
I got both arrays healthy and tested that Linux could detect them again after a reboot. The remaining choices were the mount point and filesystem. I offered ext3 if the client did not have another preference.
The storage work was only part of the assignment. Another system needed its PHP and MySQL stack cleaned up, backed up, removed, reinstalled, and restored. LDAP authentication and phpLDAPadmin needed attention too. The existing directory configuration had been built without the clean schema files I expected, so I was retracing decisions made by somebody else.
I kept the time boxed. About three hours were already in, and I planned to stop after one more rather than burn a night chasing an old configuration that might be easier to rebuild.
This was the hands-on work I had wanted when I started looking for a second shift. It was also a reminder that inheriting systems means inheriting their history. The disk can look empty while an invisible mapper says otherwise. The directory can work while the setup files that explain it are nowhere to be found.
Steve and Barry were healthy by the end of the update.
The rest of the environment still had stories to tell.