Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo on Dell PowerEdge 2600 / 2800? AMI / LSI MegaRAID driver?
On Thursday 20 December 2007, Stroller wrote: ... I was expecting something similar to when I've hotplugged SATA drives on my desktop machine. What controller is in that, please? Does it do hardware RAID, or is it just a regular SATA controller? I've done it using both the onboard controllers: nVidia nForce4 CK804 SATA, and Silicon Image SiI 3114. They both claim RAID but I'm sure it's done by the driver in both cases. stated that SATA controllers are not _required_ to support hot- plugging, either. This makes choosing an SATA more complicated, of Eek! Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've swapped the SATA drive from my laptop to my desktop and back quite a few times without an issue. Friends have hotplugged their drives into this machine too many times with no ill effects. We plug the power into the drive first, then once it's spun up insert the SATA data cable. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo on Dell PowerEdge 2600 / 2800? AMI / LSI MegaRAID driver?
On 20 Dec 2007, at 07:26, kashani wrote: Stroller wrote: Just a quick question to see if any of the list members are using Gentoo - or any other Linux distro for that matter - on Dell PowerEdge 2600 or 2800 servers? ... I used Redhat, Fedora, and Gentoo on 2550, 1650, 2650, 1750, 1850, and 2850 PowerEdge servers ... Blimey! You obviously know your stuff. So how do you find Gentoo measures up to Redhat / Fedora on these machines? Other than the CPU/RAM the main different between 2650, 2850, and 2950 was the SCSI card. I'd choose the 2850 over the 2650 given a choice for anything with heavy I/O and the 2950 are noticeably faster than the 2850 for our db stuff. Ours is a 2800, and it's the 2600 that I find most readily / cheaply available. Looks like the xx50 models are the rack-mount lower- profile models of the same generation. Looks like they're more expensive secondhand and it's not obvious if hot-swap PSUs are available? The machines at this site aren't under high-load, so that's not really a problem. We like this class of servers for the redundancy of the moving-and-failure-prone kind of parts (PSU disks). If I might ask some follow-up questions: Are the SCSI cards in these models the same brand / chipset / Linux driver, please? Or are they completely different? The SCSI on 2850's should be megaraid and you want the megaraid-new driver and Linux kernels would have issues if you tried to build both new and old so just pick new. (this might have changed in the past year since I've built a custom kernel for a 2850). I never had driver issues with any distro provided kernel or my own kernels. Thanks for that pointer. IIRC you can pull the megarc RPMs from Dell's website and install them. I never got around to making them work with Gentoo, but it shouldn't be terribly hard. I don't know of anything in the normal driver that will tell you any ifo about status or failed drives, but I never looked that hard. Hmmmn... googling a bit further I find that `megarc` are the userspace utilities for these cards, and that they're only available as binaries. I feel my enthusiasm for these units flagging - the cost savings of buying secondhand aren't so much that I wouldn't rather find a fully-OSS alternative. I bought most of my 2850's about two years ago. Dual Xeon's, 8GB, 6 x 10k 146GB drives, and remote management card for about $4000. Yeah, we paid £1300, I think, at about the same time. Dual Xeons the DRAC, but much less RAM disk-space. Stroller.-- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo on Dell PowerEdge 2600 / 2800? AMI / LSI MegaRAID driver?
On 20 Dec 2007, at 07:31, Steve Dommett wrote: On Thursday 20 December 2007, Stroller wrote: I maintain a few Poweredges, I think mostly 2950. Just yesterday we swapped a drive on the Fusion MPT SAS controller. We were prompted to take the drive out of service by an email from 'smartd'... After failing and removing the drive from the array using 'mdadm', we tried hotswapping the drive, and whilst nothing untoward happened when we pulled the drive there were no kernel messages either. ... We had to reboot the server to get it to see the replacement drive. Funnily enough, I've experienced something similar on this 2800 of ours the last couple of days, also a prefailure. This machine is running Windows, and the new drive was recognised in OpenManage Server Administrator https://localhost:1311 but despite it showing exactly the same size (68.24gig) as the other two already installed (as RAID1) when I tried to assign it as global hot-spare I got directed to a message saying that it was insufficient to accommodate all virtual disks. The Dell tech support guy - who has been BRILLIANTLY helpful over a simple failed drive, by the way - advised installing the latest firmware updates. After rebooting the drive has been fine, and I was able to allocate as hot-spare with a single click, although I guess I can't say whether this is because of the updates or of just the reboot. But the engineer also mentioned these updates, so multiple sources concur, at least. The DRAC remote-administration unit also seems much more responsive with the newer firmware. ... I was expecting something similar to when I've hotplugged SATA drives on my desktop machine. What controller is in that, please? Does it do hardware RAID, or is it just a regular SATA controller? I've been reading a little about hotplugging SATA recently, and as I understand it hotplugging is a part of the SATA specification in a way that it's not in EIDE (or even SCSI?). But what I read also stated that SATA controllers are not _required_ to support hot- plugging, either. This makes choosing an SATA more complicated, of course - I can't hep thinking it's easiest to plump for a SATA controller advertised to do hot-swap hardware RAID - I imagine this might be better marketed than a regular SATA controller that happens to support hot-swapping (but no RAID). Due simply to the price of disks we'd tend to choose hot-plug SATA RAID over hot-plug SCSI, if were to buy new. Stroller. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo on Dell PowerEdge 2600 / 2800? AMI / LSI MegaRAID driver?
Stroller wrote: On 20 Dec 2007, at 07:26, kashani wrote: I used Redhat, Fedora, and Gentoo on 2550, 1650, 2650, 1750, 1850, and 2850 PowerEdge servers ... Blimey! You obviously know your stuff. So how do you find Gentoo measures up to Redhat / Fedora on these machines? Never had an issue with Gentoo on any of them. The SCSI and ether drivers were well supported. Other than the CPU/RAM the main different between 2650, 2850, and 2950 was the SCSI card. I'd choose the 2850 over the 2650 given a choice for anything with heavy I/O and the 2950 are noticeably faster than the 2850 for our db stuff. Ours is a 2800, and it's the 2600 that I find most readily / cheaply available. Looks like the xx50 models are the rack-mount lower-profile models of the same generation. Looks like they're more expensive secondhand and it's not obvious if hot-swap PSUs are available? I am not sure about the xx00 series, but you could hot swap PSUs in the xx50 machines. The machines at this site aren't under high-load, so that's not really a problem. We like this class of servers for the redundancy of the moving-and-failure-prone kind of parts (PSU disks). If I might ask some follow-up questions: Are the SCSI cards in these models the same brand / chipset / Linux driver, please? Or are they completely different? Hmmm the SCSI card was onboard and you could get RAID by adding the memory dimm/unlocker doohicky if your system didn't come with it. We hit Ebay and picked up a bunch for cheap. Within a series the SCSI card was always the same other than maybe minor revision. Perc3i ver 3, ver 2, and etc in the 2600 and then Perc4i ver 1, ver 2 in the 2800. You'd never have an issue with an early rev or later rev having issues in any 2.6 kernel I ran. kashani -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
[gentoo-user] Gentoo on Dell PowerEdge 2600 / 2800? AMI / LSI MegaRAID driver?
Just a quick question to see if any of the list members are using Gentoo - or any other Linux distro for that matter - on Dell PowerEdge 2600 or 2800 servers? A site I manage has had from new a 2800 running Windows, which we're quite happy with (the 2800, that is, not Windows ;). We really need new hardware for our Linux-based mailserver similar systems seem to be quite affordable on the secondhand market, and it would make quite a bit of sense for us to use one of these. I haven't done much digging yet, but thought a quick show of hands here might save some time. It looks like the SCSI hot-swap / RAID controller uses an AMI / LSI MegaRAID driver which is (?) part of the main kernel - anyone know if that does status updates (dead-hard drives c) to the syslog? Does it depend on any userland utilities that are only available as RPM or whatever? I know RedHat /or Suse are supported on this machine, but I've been using Gentoo so long now I find it hard to use them thar binary distros. It'd also be nice if power-supply failures were logged in the same way - anyone know? I've had some experience in the past with a Compaq Proliant 6500 and certain utilities for that would only report problems via SNMP, which was a bit of a pain. Cheers, Stroller. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo on Dell PowerEdge 2600 / 2800? AMI / LSI MegaRAID driver?
Stroller wrote: Just a quick question to see if any of the list members are using Gentoo - or any other Linux distro for that matter - on Dell PowerEdge 2600 or 2800 servers? A site I manage has had from new a 2800 running Windows, which we're quite happy with (the 2800, that is, not Windows ;). We really need new hardware for our Linux-based mailserver similar systems seem to be quite affordable on the secondhand market, and it would make quite a bit of sense for us to use one of these. I haven't done much digging yet, but thought a quick show of hands here might save some time. It looks like the SCSI hot-swap / RAID controller uses an AMI / LSI MegaRAID driver which is (?) part of the main kernel - anyone know if that does status updates (dead-hard drives c) to the syslog? Does it depend on any userland utilities that are only available as RPM or whatever? I know RedHat /or Suse are supported on this machine, but I've been using Gentoo so long now I find it hard to use them thar binary distros. It'd also be nice if power-supply failures were logged in the same way - anyone know? I've had some experience in the past with a Compaq Proliant 6500 and certain utilities for that would only report problems via SNMP, which was a bit of a pain. I used Redhat, Fedora, and Gentoo on 2550, 1650, 2650, 1750, 1850, and 2850 PowerEdge servers. Never had an issue and never had driver issues other than early tg3 ether driver problems with Redhat 8. I'd assume the 2800 and 2600s are roughly the same. Other than the CPU/RAM the main different between 2650, 2850, and 2950 was the SCSI card. I'd choose the 2850 over the 2650 given a choice for anything with heavy I/O and the 2950 are noticeably faster than the 2850 for our db stuff. The SCSI on 2850's should be megaraid and you want the megaraid-new driver and Linux kernels would have issues if you tried to build both new and old so just pick new. (this might have changed in the past year since I've built a custom kernel for a 2850). I never had driver issues with any distro provided kernel or my own kernels. IIRC you can pull the megarc RPMs from Dell's website and install them. I never got around to making them work with Gentoo, but it shouldn't be terribly hard. I don't know of anything in the normal driver that will tell you any ifo about status or failed drives, but I never looked that hard. I bought most of my 2850's about two years ago. Dual Xeon's, 8GB, 6 x 10k 146GB drives, and remote management card for about $4000. Discount as appropriate. kashani -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo on Dell PowerEdge 2600 / 2800? AMI / LSI MegaRAID driver?
On Thursday 20 December 2007, Stroller wrote: I haven't done much digging yet, but thought a quick show of hands here might save some time. It looks like the SCSI hot-swap / RAID controller uses an AMI / LSI MegaRAID driver which is (?) part of the main kernel - anyone know if that does status updates (dead-hard drives c) to the syslog? Does it depend on any userland utilities that are only available as RPM or whatever? I maintain a few Poweredges, I think mostly 2950. Just yesterday we swapped a drive on the Fusion MPT SAS controller. We were prompted to take the drive out of service by an email from 'smartd'. I couldn't find any evidence of bad sectors or I/O timeouts in /var/log/messages, so this must be the SMART prefailure it purported to be in the email. In /etc/smartd.conf I use: DEVICESCAN -H -l error -l selftest -t -I 194 -W 5,45,48 -R 5 -R 194 -R 231 -m [EMAIL PROTECTED] After failing and removing the drive from the array using 'mdadm', we tried hotswapping the drive, and whilst nothing untoward happened when we pulled the drive there were no kernel messages either. I was expecting something similar to when I've hotplugged SATA drives on my desktop machine. We had to reboot the server to get it to see the replacement drive. Perhaps there's some /proc/ or /sys/ setting to trigger a rescan of the SCSI bus, but I couldn't find it. Other than those oddities the drive swap went well. Cheers, Steve. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
