Hi, I've been fighting a couple of days trying to set up a debian machine and an external RAID to work with debian. The configuration is: A dell poweredge 850 server with two serial ata drives. A LSI PCI SCSI Controller, that works under linux. a EonStor RAID, connected to the scsi controller using a cable.
the thing is, after using the last kernel, we managed to make the scsi card work correctly. Apparently there are some bugs in the previous versions of the kernel/drivers for the scsi card that create some problems when trying to access a device. We had those with an earlier version of the kernel and got it fixed by using 2.6.17.4. So, we are using etch on this server in order to recognize all the hardware. Everything is working flawlessly (apparently). The sata drives are mapped by default to /dev/sda and /dev/sdb and that's how we installed debian. But the problem arises when we connect the external RAID to the system. The thing is that the system randomly assigns the device /dev/sdc and /dev/sda to the RAID, so, sometimes it boots perfectly (when it is /dev/sdc) and some others, the boot process aborts (when it is /dev/sda) because the linux is not finding the / partitions (as the sata disks are now located at /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc). From what I have been reading, the system loads the modules asynchronously using udev (I guess) and so that's why the RAID is assigned /dev/sda or /dev/sdc. I've been trying to figure out how to set the order at which I'd like the modules to be loaded, but with no luck. I've been trying to define a couple of rules at /etc/udev/rules.d/ in order to change the devices assigned, but all I get are some symlinks to the real devices in /dev but the problem continues to be there. So, I would really appreciate if someone could give some hints on how to alter the order at which the devices are defined as I am a little bit lost. I don't know if it has something to do with initrd images, or udev, hotplug or the order at which the modules are loaded at boot time. Any hint would be appreciated, ;) really. I've also been thinking about getting rid of udev, but I don't want to create a complete mess as I don't really know if this is really I should be doing. -- Jesús Roncero Franco http://localhost
