Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo on Dell PowerEdge 2600 / 2800? AMI / LSI MegaRAID driver?

[kashani]

Stroller wrote:
> Just a quick question to see if any of the list members are using Gentoo
> - or any other Linux distro for that matter - on Dell PowerEdge 2600 or
> 2800 servers?
>
> A site I manage has had from new a 2800 running Windows, which we're
> quite happy with (the 2800, that is, not Windows ;). We really need new
> hardware for our Linux-based mailserver & similar systems seem to be
> quite affordable on the secondhand market, and it would make quite a bit
> of sense for us to use one of these.
>
> I haven't done much digging yet, but thought a quick show of hands here
> might save some time. It looks like the SCSI hot-swap / RAID controller
> uses an AMI / LSI MegaRAID driver which is (?) part of the main kernel -
> anyone know if that does status updates (dead-hard drives &c) to the
> syslog? Does it depend on any userland utilities that are only available
> as RPM or whatever?
>
> I know RedHat &/or Suse are supported on this machine, but I've been
> using Gentoo so long now I find it hard to use them thar binary distros.
> It'd also be nice if power-supply failures were logged in the same way -
> anyone know? I've had some experience in the past with a Compaq Proliant
> 6500 and certain utilities for that would only report problems via SNMP,
> which was a bit of a pain.

	I used Redhat, Fedora, and Gentoo on 2550, 1650, 2650, 1750, 1850, and 
2850 PowerEdge servers. Never had an issue and never had driver issues 
other than early tg3 ether driver problems with Redhat 8. I'd assume the 
2800 and 2600s are roughly the same.
	Other than the CPU/RAM the main different between 2650, 2850, and 2950 
was the SCSI card. I'd choose the 2850 over the 2650 given a choice for 
anything with heavy I/O and the 2950 are noticeably faster than the 2850 
for our db stuff.

The SCSI on 2850's should be megaraid and you want the megaraid-new 
driver and Linux kernels would have issues if you tried to build both 
new and old so just pick new. (this might have changed in the past year 
since I've built a custom kernel for a 2850). I never had driver issues 
with any distro provided kernel or my own kernels.

IIRC you can pull the megarc RPMs from Dell's website and install them. 
I never got around to making them work with Gentoo, but it shouldn't be 
terribly hard. I don't know of anything in the normal driver that will 
tell you any ifo about status or failed drives, but I never looked that 
hard.

I bought most of my 2850's about two years ago. Dual Xeon's, 8GB, 6 x 
10k 146GB drives, and remote management card for about $4000. Discount 
as appropriate.

kashani
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