On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 3:48 AM, Stan Hoeppner
<stan@hardwarefreak.com> wrote:
No. What I'm saying is that Qlogic never shipped, and does not ship, a
SPARC/Linux binary of its utility package. And they don't ship the source. If
that package is required to program that HBA, then you're hosed, screwed.
Hi Stan,
thanks for that. Just FYI and FWIW,
They actually do ship packages for RH /SuSE Linux (32-bit and 64-bit) and Solaris for x86 and SPARC both.
Now it appears that these packages come with an install script and rpm packages or whatever is equivalent for the Suse distribution and tried to build it/port it/translate it to work over Debian. So I was trying to see if there was anyone who's maybe played around with it a bit or talked to QLogic support in the past and have them build him a special package. I don't suppose it would be too hard for the Qlogic engineers to re-package the same driver and installer for Debian if they did it for RH Linux and Suse. Alternatively, I somehow seem to remember that there was an RPM install utility for Debian available, but again just because it lets one install an RPM doesn't mean the packages will work. I don't actually know how each of these Linux Distros are different i.e. RHEL/SuSE/Debian etc. Other than different commands and packages etc, I don't know how're / if they're architecturaly or fundamentally different that given the packages for one distro one smart Linux engineer can't make it work on the other. So was trying to see if someone has done it. But things are not as bad as you made them sound :)
Given that the box you bought has no less than _4_ GbE ports IIRC, I'd probably
recommend that you use the software iSCSI initiator and forget using the Qlogic
iSCSI HBA. You'll likely save yourself a TON of time and heartache. And since
you bought this box surplus at more than 4 years of age, it means you don't
_need_ maximum performance WRT your iSCSI traffic to your SAN array. If you
_do_ need maximum performance, bond 2 or 3 of the GbE ports and get
double/triple what you can with the single Qlogic HBA.
Yes, you read correctly that V240 has 4 GbE ports. Unfortunately, those are all taken wired up to different switches which are completely isolated from the SAN cloud and I live 10,000 miles from where these machines are. They were running Solaris 8, but then due to various reasons I remotely network installed Debian for Sparc on them, but now I'm stuck with trying to configure the HBA which is the _only_ physical connection to the SAN cloud for this poor machine.
I will take your advice however and go pester the people in these other mailing lists you mentioned to see if someone's tinkered with the available driver and utility packages to reverse-engineer/rebuild/port them to Debian
Cheers,
\R