Re: Need SAS HBA for Debian Jessie
On 23. mai 2015 03:19, Leslie Rhorer wrote:
> Oh, you're right, although I had many of the same issues in that area,
> as well. That said, I still have not definitively pinpointed the
> source of the problems. The LSI controller on the Squeeze system is
> working without a hard failure, however. A couple of the drives still
> suffer timeouts with that controller, but it doesn't barf when they
> do. It just resets the drive. I would happily buy another of these LSI
> controllers, but they don't have support for the management utility
> under Jessie (or Wheezy, for that matter). They work with the kernel,
> but without using the management software to tweak the controller
> parameters (especially the write-through cache), performance is truly
> dismal. I mean really, really bad.
>> Here I agree with you. OTOH, if this had been for a "enterprise"
>> setting, a suggestion to check out RH - with their level of commercial
>> support - would not necessarily be a bad one.
>
I'm using LSI stuff myself. If you want plug and play, you will need to
go with a supported distro.
To spell it out: the choices if you go with LSI are either a) insanity
or b) a supported distro. Myself i picked the insanity route.
I have been using the LSI command-line utitilities under debian (wheezy
and jessie) and now gentoo (slightly more plug and play). They run just
fine once you get them unpacked. I have made some script wrappers around
MegaCli, and after a couple of years my mind is so warped that MegaCli
almost makes sense. StorCli is actually slightly less insane to work
with, but supports a different set of LSI hardware. The worst mindf*ck
is the inconsistency in naming and concepts, an the resulting muddled
grouping of the commands/options. Remember, case is irrelevant and the
'-' in front of options is optional.
One script wrapper I use is :
---------/usr/local/bin/megacli
#!/bin/sh
echo
/apub/hakon/lsi/8.07.14_MegaCLI/Linux/opt/MegaRAID/MegaCli/MegaCli64
"$@" a0 nolog:
exec
/apub/hakon/lsi/8.07.14_MegaCLI/Linux/opt/MegaRAID/MegaCli/MegaCli64
"$@" a0 nolog
---------
Another one I call "megahelp", and is a fancy way to grep the built-in
help in the megacli. The source started out with the output from
"/apub/hakon/lsi/8.07.14_MegaCLI/Linux/opt/MegaRAID/MegaCli/MegaCli64
help". I am currently running my raid on a gentoo box, and the script
you find here: <http://alstadheim.priv.no/megahelp> is sort-of-ported
and halfway improved from what I used to run on my jessie box. I
discovered that "megacli help <command>" gives a different output from
just "megacli help", so I swithced megahelp to use the former where
appropriate, without removing the old code.
Once you get something like this going, you add liberal use of grep on
the output of megacli commands to pick out the relevant information you
are after, and maintenance of LSI raid under debian is OK. Logging is
weird though.
P.S: Having a bios that allows you to tweak the settings before booting
is quite nice, on my newest rig that actually works. Take a look in the
bios screens, you might be pleasantly surprised.
--
Regards, Håkon
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