Friday, October 19, 2012

Dell PERC 5/e on Fedora 16 and an MD1000 Enclosure

For various reasons I have a Dell PERC 5/e hooked up to an MD1000 enclosure on a workstation running Fedora 16 64 bit. All is fine with the already configured raid but I can't edit it at all when I add or remove drives. For a long time I lacked a way to edit arrays without rebooting to bios.

Now no more.

Thanks to the following links:

Download link for MegaCli: http://www.lsi.com/downloads/Public/Obsolete/Obsolete%20Common%20Files/4.00.16_Linux_MegaCli.zip

Ah-ha moment link (a.k.a how to make it work): http://www.kattare.com/docs/faq_view/1532/how-can-i-setup-megacli-on-my-64-bit-ubuntu-11-04-or-12-04.html

How to use it: http://tools.rapidsoft.de/perc/perc-cheat-sheet.html

So first download the zip, unzip the zip, unzip the zip that was in the zip, yum localinstall the rpm and you're done installing. You'll find the program in /opt/MegaRAID/MegaCli/

Now for the magic to make it work, lets make a shell script wrapper. It's not mandatory but it's a good idea. Just look at the ah-ha moment's link about 2/3rds down the page right after the part where they "Test it out..." Actually, just read the whole page. In case that's down the magic is that the program checks the kernel version and only runs on 2.6.
setarch x86_64 --uname-2.6 /opt/MegaRAID/MegaCli/MegaCli64
Will make it work. The script sticks all that in a wrapper for less typing.




No comments: