Date: Sun, 2 Apr 2000 22:10:32 -0500 (CDT) From: Chris Dillon <cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us> To: Mutex Records USA <mut3x@hotmail.com> Cc: freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: AMI Raid Controller Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.20.0004022118160.59406-100000@mail.wolves.k12.mo.us> In-Reply-To: <20000402233347.20868.qmail@hotmail.com>
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On Sun, 2 Apr 2000, Mutex Records USA wrote: > I'm considering getting some AMI 1400 raid controllers for a few servers. > I understand that they don't support booting, that's fine, I want to have a > disk for system/swap anyway. Mike Smith (the author of the amr driver for FreeBSD) is going to be a much better authority on AMI MegaRAID controllers than I am, but I just recently bought an Enterprise 1200 to play with. I can boot from this thing just fine, by the way. > My question: I understand that the AMI card supports hotswapping > drives. Is this supported by the FreeBSD driver? If so I am > planning on buying some removable Kingston drive shells (unless > someone can reccommend a better one!) Also, how would I be > notified that a drive has failed? console messages? > /var/log/messages, or wherever kernel error messages are set to go > by /etc/syslog.conf? The boxes are going to be in colocation > about 800 miles away, so I need to know if a drive has croaked... > My hearing is good, but not *that* good. :) If I understand correctly, as long as the logical drive doesn't enter the Failed or Offline states, then the driver won't care or need to know and you can just swap a physical drive out and the controller will begin to automatically begin to rebuild the logical drive, assuming you have allowed it to do automatic rebuild. You can also set up a hot spare to have it happen without your intervention. Obviously if a logical drive enters the Failed or Offline state, the driver is going to have to know about it. I have no idea if Mike put anything in the driver to warn you about logical drives entering Degraded mode, but from a quick look through the amr sources, it doesn't look like it. The controller will definately let out a loud and relentless ear-piercing beep when a logical disk is in the Degraded/Failed/Offline states. :-) The controllers support communication with disk cabinets through either a fault-bus connector or serial port, so if you used one of those you could at least get a visual indication of which disk has failed -- great if you want to hire a monkey to look for little red lights once in a while and pull and replace a drive if one lights up. :-) -- Chris Dillon - cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us - cdillon@inter-linc.net FreeBSD: The fastest and most stable server OS on the planet. For Intel x86 and Alpha architectures. ( http://www.freebsd.org ) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-scsi" in the body of the message
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