On Tue, 5 Sep 2000, Edwin Chiu wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was wondering if anyone has had positive and/or negative experiences
> with the Compaq SMART2 RAID controller or whatever else they are using
> in the Proliant servers these days.
I'm unsure if this really belongs to the linux-raid list, but my
experiences with the SMART2 driver are very positive on several setups
and controllers with and without SMP (for the latter, you need to specify
OS-type in the systems bios.. This is difficult: I can not give a rule of
thumb here. Other or MSDOS are definitely bad (usually only one cpu
detected). Unixware 7 is often used, newer BIOS'ses even have a linux
setting. However, both have already failed badly on me in cases where
the Windows NT setting worked for linux (but failed miserable on other
Proliant models).
Just see on http://www.insync.net/~frantzc/cpqarray.html if your
controller is supported. I had also no problem (I never had any) with
older versions (late 2.0.3x series), but some more patches for lilo (yes
you can boot from raid no problem) and fdisk (the latter only cosmetical,
you can live w/o it) were required. The raid driver came with a command
line utility to display status of an automatic recovery, which I could
never get to run, whoever. There's also a graphical version of it which I
could never run too as it uses a graphix lib quite exotic to me.
Decent linux distributions have the driver included and install on it
automatic and flawlessly.
Final note(s): I found memory size misdetected on several Proliant's,
sometimes even only a few megs not sufficient for the installation
CD's. Make use of the mem= parameter.
When making the system bootable, don't install lilo on the MBR but on a
partition (/boot for example) which you mark active. This way you can
still boot into your compaq system partition. If you run the system
keyboard/monitor less behind a keyboard/monitor multiplexer specify a boot
delay into lilo (forgot exact syntax see man-page) s.t. you have a few
seconds chance to interrupt the bootprocess and add own parameters.
Holding down shift or scroll-lock or something doesn't work here.
Good luck,
Michael.
--
Michael Weller: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED],
or even [EMAIL PROTECTED] If you encounter an eowmob account on
any machine in the net, it's very likely it's me.
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