Re: jessie won't install/boot on a Dell Poweredge R815

[Jeffrey Mark Siskind <qobi@purdue.edu>]

   >    Are you certain that there isn't a PERC H700 in this machine? [Sort of
   >    odd that mpt2sas is triggering a state error in your screenshot if there
   >    actually isn't one.]
   > 
   > There could be one. But I probably don't use it. I use software RAID. Dell
   > wouldn't sell an R815 without an OS. I think I purchased it with RHEL which
   > may have needed the PERC H700. But I never even booted RHEL. The first
   > thing I did was a fresh install of squeeze, or maybe wheezy.

   We definitely sell PowerEdge systems without an OS and have for quite a
   while. However, we do limit configuration for higher end systems to include
   hardware RAID.

My appologies. I may misremember. I purchased the machines (twelve T5500s,
four R815s, and four C6145s) about 5 years ago and don't remember precisely
the arrangements. I'd have to check archived email to know for sure.

The machines were purchased through ECN (Purdue's Engineering IT services). I'm
a lowly professor. But I software-maintain my own machines. I definitely
didn't spec out a hardware RAID controller. The mechanisms by which one was
included are unclear at this point.

   There's definitely a PERC controller in there based on <https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2016/06/msg00934.html>
   "05:00.0 Serial Attached SCSI controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS2008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 [Falcon] (rev 03)"

   I'm not seeing the subvendor/subsystem ID's there but it's presumably the
   PERC 6/i. If you're really not using it at all, you might be able to pull
   it out if the driver for it is causing problems. However, I suspect you
   need it to connect to the drive backplane. Stuart (CCed) may be able to
   offer some more insight into driver issues you might see.

   The SATA controller should only really be in use by the optical drive if
   present. Some of the mid-tier systems of that generation support SATA
   drives connected directly to a controller on the motherboard, but support
   for that under Linux was spotty from my recollection.

My T5500s have optical drives. But neither my R815s nor my C6145s have optical
drives. All my machines have SATA drives. The R815s in question each have
six ST9500530NS drives. They have been running squeeze and then wheezy with
software RAID for 5 years since purchase.

Now that I have someone from Dell on the line who appears to be
Debian-friendly, it would be nice if you made firmware upgrades
Debian-friendly. I have been able to apply

  R815_BIOS_JF8YH_LN_3.2.2.BIN

but have not been able to apply

  ESM_Firmware_7N76T_LN32_1.07_A00.BIN
  ESM_Firmware_J7YYK_LN32_2.85_A00.BIN
  SATA_FRMW_LX_R300994.BIN

(I don't even know if either of the ESM upgrades are for my hardware. But the
shell scripts don't run.)

    Jeff (http://engineering.purdue.edu/~qobi)