Re: "big" machines running Debian?
On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 11:41:03AM +1100, Alex Samad wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 07:08:13PM -0500, Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 05:10:58PM -0600, Ron Johnson wrote:
> > > On 02/25/2009 04:37 PM, Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
> > > >On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 04:48:30PM -0500, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
>
> [snip]
> >
> > Not with my NetRaid card. It takes the physical disks and assembles
> > them into virtual disks which appear to the OS as sd* of whatever size.
> >
>
> This begs the question why did you pick hardware raid over software raid
The HP NetServer LPr PII-450 boxes (4) I bought came with:
two CPUs
1 GB ram
two 72 GB SCSI drives (hot-swap)
and the HP NetRaid-1si card.
All for, IIRC, $65 CDN.
> I have been a long supporter of software raid, but I find myself leaning
> towards a HP smart array 400 and using hardware raid (looking at 10
> disks in raid6).
>
> My current thoughts are why should I have 10 channels (4 of them come
> from 1 pcix card) when I could have 1 channel to the smart array. there
> seem to be a few cciss utilities for me to track the array
All the status info ends up in /proc/megaraid. True, there aren't any
utilities to monitor it. The card does have an alarm, although it isn't
testable under the Linux Megaraid driver (it is under OpenBSD's driver).
I'm starting work on a monitoring program. Actually, I'm using it as an
exercise to refresh my structured analysis and design technique skills
(they're over 20 years rusty [God, it is that long; I'm getting old].
I'll do it in Ada, modularized so that if the proc intefaces changes I
only have to change that module.
> I am waying this up against the ability to easily manage the array and
> do upgrade and change disk and monitor the individual disks
sure, you can't (under Linux) make new arrays on the card (requries
booting into the bios) although there is supposed to be a dos program; I
wonder if it can run under one of the dos emulators for linux.
The individual disks can be monitored via the /proc interface.
/proc/megaraid:
hba0/
/proc/megaraid/hba0:
battery-status
config
diskdrives-ch0
diskdrives-ch1
diskdrives-ch2
diskdrives-ch3
mailbox
raiddrives-0-9
raiddrives-10-19
raiddrives-20-29
raiddrives-30-39
rebuild-rate
stat
/proc/megaraid/hba0/diskdrives-ch0
Channel: 0 Id: 0 State: Online.
Vendor: HP Model: 36.4GB C 80-D94N Rev: D94N
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Channel: 0 Id: 1 State: Online.
Vendor: HP Model: 36.4GB C 80-D94N Rev: D94N
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
/proc/megaraid/hba0/raiddrives-0-9
Logical drive: 0:, state: optimal
Span depth: 1, RAID level: 1, Stripe size: 64, Row size: 2
Read Policy: Adaptive, Write Policy: Write thru, Cache Policy: Cached IO
Logical drive: 1:, state: optimal
Span depth: 0, RAID level: 0, Stripe size:128, Row size: 0
Read Policy: No read ahead, Write Policy: Write thru, Cache Policy: Cached IO
This shows that both hard drives are Online. Both Raid drives are in an
optimal state.
I hope this helps your decision making.
If you want to send me your ideas for the requriments for the monitoring
software, I'll encorporate it in my system analysis.
Thanks,
Doug.
Reply to: