Doomshammer's Weblog

This night, I finally got the 4 x 320GiB SATA disks and the 2 Adaptec SATA controllers installed into my old file server. The old server was running out of free disk space, so I bought the 4 disks some month ago. Unfortunatelly, the server is only an old P3-1200MHz w/o any SATA controllers on-board, so I had to search for external controllers, that fit into an old PCI 33/66MHz slot.

The master plan was, to just add a controller and the new disks and move the existing data from the old server (running Solaris 10u2) to the new disks. Sadly I wasn't able to find just one (inexpensive) controller that would work with Solaris. As the 2nd controller I tried didn't work as well, I decided to install Linux instead, as the controller has Linux support.

So my new master plan, was to install CRUX on the new disks. All disks should be built up into a RAID array and the array should be enhancable, in case the I will be running out of free disk space again. What would I need? Not much... A CRUX installation CD, mdadm, and some luck

The CRUX installation CD booted and luckily directly found the 4 SATA disks as sda-sdd. So the first step was to create 3 partitions on all 4 disks (well, actually only on sda, as sfdisk did it on the other 3 disks ). I created a 18GiB partition for /, a 2 GiB partition for swap and assigned the rest (300 GiB) as another partition. All partitions get FD as type, so that I can run md on it. Next step was to create a RAID1 on sda-d0 and sda-d1 (for the / and the swap FS) and a RAID5 on sda-d2. As the CRUX installation CD already has the MD-Tools installed, this was not a big deal. Now I had my 3 partitions and could go on with the installtion.

After the usual installation and kernel building stuff, I finally had to configure LILO with the extra-raid-options and execute it. That's it... CRUX has been installed on /dev/md0 and is ready to go. After a reboot, the system came up as expected and I could start the LVM2 installation, so that I can work with volumes instead of partitions. I only set up LVM for /dev/md2 (which is the RAID5) and it works like a charme. Now my file server is ready and can take data from my workstation and laptop again

Summary: A really quick way to build a file server with cheap hardware and really small efforts, is easily done with CRUX, mdadm and LVM.

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This weekend I had to build a server for a customer. The hardware was given by the customer- I only had to set it up. Unfortunately I ran into a bunch of troubles, as Dell shipped the wrong hardware (sadly I noticed this much to late).

Given hardware was a Dell PowerEdge 1950 with Quad Core CPU and 4 GiB RAM. The server has 2 x73 GiB internal hard disks (SAS) and (currently) 4 x 500 GiB disks in a Dell PowerVault MD1000 (SAS) storage array. So far, so good... When I booted the machine the first time, I wondered why the systems disks were connected to a RAID controller (a PERC 5/i) - but I simply went on. The Solaris installer started and everything worked fine - at least until the installer reached the point where it wanted to partition the disks... "No disks found" was the message, the installer showed.

I rebooted and tried to disable the RAID-support of the controller, so that it only acts as SAS controller and passes the single drives through, but the PERC 5/i doesn't have a option for JBOD. So I looked up the chipset on the controller (LSISAS1068), downloaded the Solaris x86 driver from the LSI homepage and burned it on CD. Again the Solaris installer started and I chose "5" for "apply driver update", followed by "c" for CD. The installer recognized the driver on the CD, installed it, but when I executed "format", the disks still weren't found.

After some research in the internet I figured out, that the LSI 1068 controllers, that are shipped with Dell hardware, are confiugred with another firmware - which isn't supported by the LSI driver ... and of course Dell doesn't provide and Solaris driver.

Luckily, after some further research in tons of internet forums, I found an thread about Dell 2950 in the SUN forum. In this discussion, someone announced that he has written a driver for the LSI MegaRaid and Dell Perc 5 controllers for Solaris 10. The driver can be found here. I first tried to update the driver directly in the Solaris 10 installation DVD (or more specificly within the x86.miniroot) but this very annoying if you only have a VMWare with the correct Solaris version, so that you can build the driver. Additionally the driver would be only available during the installation - I would have needed to install it manually after the installation as well. What a luck that someone built an ITU image, which can be used for the Solaris 10 installer. I made a mirror of the package with the driver and the ITU images (as I don't know, how long the site will life).

Finally - with the ITU image - I was able to install solaris on the RAID-1 that I built on the 2 system disks. The installation worked w/o any problems... business as usual. But the next shock came quickly. The next task I wanted to do, was installing the MD1000 disks as one RAID-Z ZFS pool. But guess what... Dell again shipped the wrong hardware. The ordered SAS controller wasn't installed... therefor a PERC 5/E was installed - and of course this RAID controller isn't able to pass the disks through as JBOD neither. Well, what should I do? I set up a RAID-5 on the PERC controller, so that Solaris at least sees the disk(s).

The system is now up and running in the DC but it is really annoying that:
- Dell isn't able to ship the ordered hardware
- Dell needs it's fucking own firmware on standard LSI hardware
- Dell doesn't provide Solaris drivers for their own hardware
- The crappy PERC controllers don't provide JBOD-support

Conclusion: Solaris on a Dell 1950 with a MD1000 works, but it's really hard to get it working when a PERC controller is installed. I recommend to either not order a PERC controller but a standard SAS controller or to buy your own controllers.

Update: Yesterday the re-ordered SAS 5/E controller (original LSI SAS1068 chipset) arrived and I mounted it into the Dell 1950. The 4 x 500GB disks in the MD1000 were directly recognized by the controller and the controller was automatically initialized by Solaris 10's mpt driver. All 4 disks were found by "devfsadm" and I could quickly rebuild my ZFS pool. Now I'm happy with the box. So here again my advise- be very accurate with the hardware that you order in your Dell 1950. If you want to add a MD1000 and want ZFS to take care of the RAID, then be careful not to order a PERC 5/i or PERC 5/E controller but to take the SAS version (SAS 5/i and SAS 5/E) which passes the MD1000 through as JBOD to the Solaris operating system and which works out-of-the-box with Solaris' mpt driver.

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Ich hab auf der SUN v20z gerade mal aus den zwei Platten ein RAID-1 gebaut. In der Kiste haengen zwei Seagate Cheetah 10K.6 (ST373307LC).

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