Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2006 16:41:17 -0800 (PST) From: Doug Ambrisko <ambrisko@ambrisko.com> To: Scott Mitchell <scott+lists.freebsd@fishballoon.org> Cc: Vivek Khera <vivek@khera.org>, freebsd-stable <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: 6.0 on Dell 1850 with PERC4e/DC RAID? Message-ID: <200601130041.k0D0fHOg032877@ambrisko.com> In-Reply-To: <20060106233857.GA997@tuatara.fishballoon.org>
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Scott Mitchell writes: | On Fri, Jan 06, 2006 at 10:35:46AM -0500, Vivek Khera wrote: | > | > On Jan 5, 2006, at 5:41 PM, Scott Mitchell wrote: | > | > >I may be getting a new Dell PE1850 soon, to replace our ancient CVS | > >server | > >(still running 4-STABLE). The new machine will ideally run 6.0 and | > >have a | > >PERC4e/DC RAID card - the one with battery-backed cache. This is | > >listed as | > | > I have an 1850 with the buil-in PERC 4e/Si since all I needed was the | > RAID1 mirror of the internal drives. It works extremely well, and | > the speed is quite good. | | We'll only be mirroring the internal drives too for now - the 4e/DC seems | to be the only RAID option on the 1850 with battery-backed cache, and | doesn't cost much more for the extra peace-of-mind. | | > As for notices of when the drives go bad, under 4.x I've had disk | > failures with the amr driver (different PERC cards) and not gotten | > any such notices in the syslog that I recall. | | That's a pity. Maybe Doug was thinking of one of the aac(4) based PERC | cards? Still, something I can run out of cron to check the array status | should be fine. Are you refering to this Doug. The Linux ioctl shim requires one file that hasn't been committed yet. Scott L. & ps have it. I may commit it now that I'm back. This lets all of the Dell/LSI Linux tools run on FreeBSD including the firmware update tool. The caveat is that with the driver re-do it seems the certain things in the ioctl path causes the firmware to lock-up. I haven't been around enough to help with that problem. I have a binary that locks it up pretty quick. Most of the existing monitoring tools have bugs. The Linux tools tend to be better but the last copy of MegaMon leaked shared memory then quit. We have a tool at work but it is encumbered so we can't give it out. | > I did find a program | > posted to one of the freebsd lists called 'amrstat' that I run | > nightly. It produces this kind of output: | > | > Drive 0: 68.24 GB, RAID1 <writeback,no-read-ahead,no-adaptative- | > io> optimal | > | > If it says "degraded" it is time to fix a drive. You just fire up | > the lsi megaraid tools and find out which drive it is. This is probably a faily good scheme. Caveat is that you can have a "optimal" RAID that is broken :-( On another note, ipmi is pretty good to remotely monitor these boxes and you can run the Dell SOL proxy tool for Linux on FreeBSD then setup the BIOS on the serial port and connect the serial port to BMC/LAN. FWIW, I've been working on an openipmi compatible driver. It basically works for a bunch of programs that I've tested with as long as they are compiled with a correct ioctl file. Doug A.
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