Installation of Gentoo onto Dell PowerEdge 1655 MC (Blade server) ================================================
I wrote this description because I think that it could be helpful to someone with the same problem, and it'll possibly
save him some time. It can be also interesting for Gentoo developers, who can possibly clear problems that I encountered from future versions of this wonderful distribution.
My English isn't perfect, but I hope that it'll be understandable, so let's start.
I installed Gentoo Linux, version 1.4-20030911 onto Dell PowerEdge 1655 MC blade server.
Do you know how blade server looks like?
It has only one button - on/off/restart, one USB connector and one backplane connector. Everything else (keyboard, mouse, network) reside in chassis shared with the other five blades, connected through backplane connector.
It has SCSI RAID controller PERC/4im, identified as LSI53C1030 during boot (in dmesg), and two ethernet adapters, identified as Tigon3 [partno(BCM95703A31) rev 1002 PHY(serdes)].
So I plugged in USB CDROM and booted Gentoo LiveCD. Soon I get into first problem - linuxrc script from initrd
didn't find my CDROM, though it reported (successful?) USB detection, and left me in the shell. After some exploring of the linuxrc script I found simple solution: I typed "exit" and the script's second servis was succesful.
(Note: I booted several times then, and once the script did'n detect my CDROM even on second time, but on third.
Maybe it needs some pause for USB initialization?)
First victory - I got the root prompt from live CD.
Both network devices were correctly detected, and tg3 module loaded. I could start installing onto hard drive.
But there was the second problem - I didn't see any harddisk.
Hopefully I installed Mandrake 9.2 on the same hardware some time before, so I realized, that I need to load modules mptbase and mptscsih. When I tried that, I got strange errors on console and dmesg (ioc0: <something_wrong>), and modules didn't load. It seems that it's caused by probing other SCSI modules before, because when I rebooted without scsi option, both modules loaded without problems.
Second victory - I see my discs.
I promptly partitioned the disc, created volume group and some logical volumes (which is wonderful thing in Gentoo, installation on LVM without the need of LVM support in installer), and began installing. Installation from stage 2 was without problems.
Third problem arose after reboot. Modules for my RAID weren't loaded - they weren't in initrd (I compiled the kernel using default genkernel). So I added them manually, edited linuxrc (fist time forgot to disable scsi checking, which resulted in not working RAID driver), and moved to the next problem.
Fourth problem - the kernel still didn't see the root filesystem. I used long device names in /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/grub.conf: /dev/scsi/host1/target0/lun0/partX for my harddrive. Problem was, that when I rebooted
without USB CDROM, harddisc became /dev/scsi/host0/... So I had to correct that in fstab and grub.conf. Maybe if I'd used short names like /dev/sdaX, I wouldn't encounter this problem? After correcting I got rid of kernel panic, but it still didn't boot correctly.
Fifth problem was in mounting local filesystems, residing on logical volumes. There're no "vgscan" and "vgchange -a y" (needed for LVM start) in init scripts. So I added it into /etc/init.d/localmount. I also wanted to add correct shutdown of LVM into shutdown script, but it was already there! It's a little bit inconsistent I think.
Third (and final) victory, my new Gentoo boots from harddisk!
That's all folks! No more (bigger) problems. But I know that some will appear. :-)
Have a nice day/night. Martin Horak SCE a.s. Decin, Czech republic
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