RAID userland utlities

[Jon Schneider]

We have just (rightly or otherwise) got a DL380 with Raid5i up and running Redhat Enterprise linux. Actually Whitebox.

It seems to work but there are no userland RAID tools. Where do they come from ? I've been round and round HP's site looking and am now dizzy. How do we know when a disk fails ? Are there kernel message as there are none that even mention that there is an array ? How do we maintain the array(s) ?

Jon

[JohnWRuffo]

Jon:

In order to get disk error messages and such in /var/log/messages you need to load the Storage Agent. You can install the Storage Agent with all the other agents available to Linux via the ProLiant Support Pack (PSP) which is located here:
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/support/files/server/us/download/19617.html
The full PSP is kernel dependent and you may want to look at this closely to see if it fits your build.

Alternatively, you can just install the Storage Agent as a separate daemon. This agent will want to enable SNMP and will complain that it does not see the System Managment Agents but that is ok. I know there are many administrators who do not want SNMP running on their servers (for security reasons) and I can assure you that you can turn SNMP off and still have the messages be sent.

Here is the RPM for the Storage Agent:
ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/products/servers/supportsoftware/linux/cmastor-7.1.0-12.linux.i386.rpm

The next tool you will want to install in the Array Configuration Utility. The ACU gives you a GUI (web interface) to build / reconfigure your arrays. Here is the RPM for the ACU:
ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/products/servers/supportsoftware/linux/cpqacuxe-7.15-19.linux.i386.rpm

I hope this helps! -john