The last few days I have revisited RAID setup using the LSI
-Megaraid controller. These are a family of controllers called PERC by
-Dell, and is present in several old PowerEdge servers, and I recently
-got my hands on one of these. I had forgotten how to handle this RAID
-controller in Debian, so I had to take a peek in the
-Debian wiki page
-"Linux and Hardware RAID: an administrator's summary" to remember
-what kind of software is available to configure and monitor the disks
-and controller. I prefer Free Software alternatives to proprietary
-tools, as the later tend to fall into disarray once the manufacturer
-loose interest, and often do not work with newer Linux Distributions.
-Sadly there is no free software tool to configure the RAID setup, only
-to monitor it. RAID can provide improved reliability and resilience in
-a storage solution, but only if it is being regularly checked and any
-broken disks are being replaced in time. I thus want to ensure some
-automatic monitoring is available.
-
-
In the discovery process, I came across a old free software tool to
-monitor PERC2, PERC3, PERC4 and PERC5 controllers, which to my
-surprise is not present in debian. To help change that I created a
-request for packaging of the
-megactl package, and tried to track down a usable version.
-The original project
-site is on Sourceforge, but as far as I can tell that project has
-been dead for more than 15 years. I managed to find a
-more recent fork on
-github from user hmage, but it is unclear to me if this is still
-being maintained. It has not seen much improvements since 2016. A
-more up to date
-edition is a git fork from the original github fork by user
-namiltd, and this newer fork seem a lot more promising. The owner of
-this github repository has replied to change proposals within hours,
-and had already added some improvements and support for more hardware.
-Sadly he is reluctant to commit to maintaining the tool and stated in
-my first pull
-request that he think a new release should be made based on the
-git repository owned by hmage. I perfectly understand this
-reluctance, as I feel the same about maintaining yet another package
-in Debian when I barely have time to take care of the ones I already
-maintain, but do not really have high hopes that hmage will have time
-to spend on it and hope namiltd will change his mind.
-
-
In any case, I created
-a draft package
-based on the namiltd edition and put it under the debian group on
-salsa.debian.org. If you own a Dell PowerEdge server with one of the
-PERC controllers, or any other RAID controller using the megaraid or
-megaraid_sas Linux kernel modules, you might want to check it out. If
-enough people are interested, perhaps the package will make it into
-the Debian archive.
-
-
There are two tools provided, megactl for the megaraid Linux kernel
-module, and megasasctl for the megaraid_sas Linux kernel module. The
-simple output from the command on one of my machines look like this
-(yes, I know some of the disks have problems. :).
-
-
-# megasasctl
-a0 PERC H730 Mini encl:1 ldrv:2 batt:good
-a0d0 558GiB RAID 1 1x2 optimal
-a0d1 3067GiB RAID 0 1x11 optimal
-a0e32s0 558GiB a0d0 online errs: media:0 other:19
-a0e32s1 279GiB a0d1 online
-a0e32s2 279GiB a0d1 online
-a0e32s3 279GiB a0d1 online
-a0e32s4 279GiB a0d1 online
-a0e32s5 279GiB a0d1 online
-a0e32s6 279GiB a0d1 online
-a0e32s8 558GiB a0d0 online errs: media:0 other:17
-a0e32s9 279GiB a0d1 online
-a0e32s10 279GiB a0d1 online
-a0e32s11 279GiB a0d1 online
-a0e32s12 279GiB a0d1 online
-a0e32s13 279GiB a0d1 online
-
-#
-
-
-
In addition to displaying a simple status report, it can also test
-individual drives and print the various event logs. Perhaps you too
-find it useful?
-
-
In the packaging process I provided some patches upstream to
-improve installation and ensure
-a Appstream
-metainfo file is provided to list all supported HW, to allow
-isenkram to propose
-the package on all servers with a relevant PCI card.
-
-
As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
-activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
-15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.
-
-
