Help with Ubuntu and Dell PowerEdge 2900

[Daniel Robitaille]

[humm...my initial reply seems to have disappeared in /dev/null 
land...let's try again]

Az wrote:
> Help with Ubuntu and Dell PowerEdge 2900 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----
> 
> Hi, just would like to start off by staying while I am fairly new to linux
> and ubuntu, I am trying to set up a small office with Ubuntu.
> 
> I have bought a Dell Poweredge 2900 server and am working towards setting it
> up. I have set up the server, and put the gui interface as well.

I have the same server here at work,  running Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty)

> A few questions as I go through the setup
> 
> 1) Not sure the RAID controller is working. I have 3- 500G SATA drives on
> RAID1, but it seems to see one huge 994G drive. Not sure why it is, but I
> have only portioned approx. 500G to use till the RAID is working properly.
> It seems to pick up the 80G OS drive fine.
 >
> Specs:
> - Hard Drive Controller: PERC 5/i, Integrated Controller Card
> - 2- 80GB 7.2K RPM Serial ATA 3Gbps3.5-in HotPlug Hard Drive
> - Integrated SAS/SATA RAID 1/RAID 5, PERC 5/I Integrated
> - 3- 500GB 7.2K RPM Universal SATA 3Gbps 3.5-in HotPlug Hard Drive
> 
> Question: Any ideas on why or how to correct this? Am I missing something?

I'm not a RAID expert, but RAID-1 is a mirroring setup:  if you have two 
500GB disks in RAID-1, the 2nd one is the exact copy of the first one 
for a total of 500GB in total between the two 500GB disks.  Not sure 
what happens under the hood with 3 disks in RAID-1.  But I would 
logically assume that two of the 500GB disks are mirrored together, and 
the 3rd 500GB is by itself for a total of 1000GB between the 3.  To gain 
access to the full 1500GB, you could use RAID-0.  But the cost will be 
no redundancy for your files.     Not sure how valuable that data is, 
but maybe a RAID-5 between these 3 disks would be better for your needs?



> 2) With the server came the Dell System Console and Agent CD which contains
> such items as the Dell OpenManage Server Administration, Remote Access
> Controller and several other utilities. On the DELL servers, SUSE Linux
> Enterprise Server is supported with the following commands:
> 
> - sh srvadmin-install.sh -express
> 
> Question: How would I be able to determine and install the srvadmin onto the
> server as it is an RPM install file?

The Dell OpenManage software on these CDs will not work.  Like you said, 
they are only supported on the RedHat and Suse platforms.  And from what 
I have seen after multiple google searches, they are not simple scripts 
you can fine tune to get them to install in Ubuntu.

The good news is that the community has created Debian packages of the 
OpenManage Dell software.  The best one I have found is this one:
  ftp://ftp.sara.nl/pub/outgoing/dell/binary-i386/

The bad news:  it doesn't install properly for me on my Ubuntu 7.04 
server.  I get some errors in the post-install script.  I'm still hoping 
it is simple enough to modify to get it to run. It is on my long to-do 
list to try to figure it that one out.  But that deb file work great in 
Debian 4.0 (Etch).  To tell you the truth that situation with the Dell 
web admin tools is the main reason I'm currently running Debian and not 
Ubuntu on my other Dell PowerEdge servers, and the reason why for a 
while I was seriously considering using Centos (a Red Hat Entreprise 
rebuild) on them due to that perfect support from Dell for that distro. 
  I'm sure Dell support for these tools will improve with time for 
Debian and Ubuntu, but for now, that's the situation I have seen from my 
experiments in recent months.


Other sources of info I find useful about Dell PowerEdge:

http://linux.dell.com/repo/hardware/

http://linux.dell.com/monitoring.shtml

That PERC5/i RAID card was designed by LSI.  Their MegaCLI on their web 
site will allow you to get some command line diagnostics of your RAID 
disks.  It's available here:
http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/products_home/internal_raid/megaraid_sas/megaraid_sas_8480e/index.html?remote=1&locale


And finally the Dell Linux PowerEdge mailing list is monitored by Dell 
engineers, and is often a great way to get some help and info about that 
line of servers:

http://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge



Daniel

-- 
  Daniel Robitaille