Re: R710/PERC H700/H800/MD1200 disk naming
On Tue, Aug 03, 2010 at 12:19:53PM +0100, John Hodrien scribbled in Re: R710/PERC H700/H800/MD1200 disk naming: On Tue, 3 Aug 2010, Robin Bowes wrote: On 03/08/10 11:46, Stroller wrote: On 2 Aug 2010, at 22:11, Ken Nishimura wrote: I assume that making a few large virtual disks (mostly segregated by disk type and enclosure location) and using LVM to slice and dice is the way to go? I find the thought horrifying. I choose servers like the PowerEdge because they have hardware RAID. LVM would seem, as a wild generalisation, to undermine that. Not at all. You still have your hardware RAID, but you can manage volumes and usage more easily on top if it. Much easier than using physical partitions. I couldn't agree more, and I think this is really important to stress. I'll second (or third?) that. LVM merely gives you options that you don't have without it. It's really not a pain; treat it simply and there's really very little to it. There's times I am annoyed by a lack of LVM on machines because I find it handy to use what LVM can offer me, but it's too late. There aren't times I find the inverse to be the case. Ever since I found LVM all those years ago, I've loved the flexibility that it provides -- and for once, this flexibility comes without any compromise or negative side effect. I simply don't build servers without LVM anymore. And to make Stroller happy, you can still use file-system labels ;) Combine LVM with iSCSI and you really can have some serious fun that you'd never even think of if you're not in that mindset. Again, I heartily agree. We recently expanded our SAN using Debian, LVM, iSCSI, and a 16 hot-swap chassis. Provisioning targets is a breeze, and unscripted would take only 3 commands, 4 if you're using ACLs for the initiators. (To be fair, if you want persistence we have to edit the iSCSI daemon's config file, but that's hardly an issue). And I haven't even started on snapshot backups either... LVM is made of win. Cheers. Dameon. -- ooOoo Dr. Dameon Wagner, Senior ICT Specialist, Depts. of Computer Science Information Systems, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. :Beta tester for Pegasus Mercury/32 (www.pmail.com): ooOoo ___ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
Re: Dell OpenManage 6.3 for Ubuntu
On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 01:57:25PM -0500, Michael E Brown scribbled in Re: Dell OpenManage 6.3 for Ubuntu: snip Thanks Michael, and thanks Dell (official or not ;) Any chance of a similar set for real Debian? I really hope the ubuntu packages just work on Debian. If you care to try it and report back results, that would be great. I don't have any scratch boxes to test with ATM, but we're going to be receiving a bunch of R410s and R310s within the next few weeks, so I'll try and grab one of those for testing before it goes production. Theoretically, native deb pkgs shouldnt be terribly difficult, now that we have the actual packaging done. It will have to be kind of a side project with no guarantees, though. I'll look into it. No problem. I only asked as on a couple of occasions I've had dependency version issues when running cross distro packages (although, due to the nature of stable, running Debian debs on Ubuntu works more often than Ubuntu debs on Debian). Also, while I've got your eyes/ears, is there, or will there be an updated version of http://linux.dell.com/debian_9g.shtml for the 10th and 11th gen servers? Wow, that site is hilariously out of date. Most of our effort lately has been on getting everything moved to techcenter wiki. I can poke some people, but wouldnt hold out much hope. Thanks. In the meantime, I'll browse the techcenter wiki more deeply. Cheers. Dameon. -- ooOoo Dr. Dameon Wagner, Senior ICT Specialist, Depts. of Computer Science Information Systems, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. :Beta tester for Pegasus Mercury/32 (www.pmail.com): ooOoo ___ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
Re: Hot disk change.
On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 11:28:58AM -0300, Fabio Catunda scribbled in Re: Hot disk change.: Thanks for all responses. Now I see that I am in trouble. I really cannot install everything from zero, it will take too long and might not work. I would like to know your opinion about the following procedure: 1 - Shutdown 2 - Remove both disks 3 - Plug both 2TB new disks and create a new virtual disk on the controller 4 - Plug one of the old 250GB disks in a separate SATA connector 5 - dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda (where sdb is the old disk and sda is the new virtual disk) 6 - fstab, resize2fs, etc, etc...! I really don't know if the OS will recognize and be able to read the old disk plugged in another SATA connector. If you could somehow get the old HDD plugged into the same perc, as a seperate virtual disk, and do the don't initialise trick, then I'd replace point 5 with booting into a liveCD, creating your paritions, and rsyncing everything across. That's basically how I end up migrating systems, from old to new hardware, and I've done the same in the past, just not tried it with Dell systems or PERCs yet. Cheers. Dameon. ___ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
Re: Changing BIOS Boot Order from Linux Command Line w/out Complete OM Install
On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 09:55:51AM -0400, J. Epperson scribbled in Re: Changing BIOS Boot Order from Linux Command Line w/out Complete OM Install: On Wed, March 17, 2010 23:06, Matt Domsch wrote: On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 09:07:49PM -0400, Roehrig, Jack (John) wrote: Does anyone know of a utility that exists that will allow me to modify the BIOS boot order for Dell servers (specifically Poweredge [126][6789]50s and R[4567]10) from the Linux command line? I need a tool that is very non-intrusive, minimal, script-friendly, and will allow me to configure a machine to attempt a network boot before any other devices. I cannot install a full copy of OpenManage on these machines, but am not opposed to using a precompiled binary or making the nvram device. The distributions vary, but all will have Linux 2.[46] kernels. OK, so the syscfg program from dell-toolkit.rpm will allow setting the BIOS boot order from the command line. But it will not set the BIOS service tag, which is often the only way I can track down an error when someone mungs the inventory (short of the long drive and intense physical security to eyeball the physical asset tags). When Dell replaces a motherboard, they do not set the service tag on the new board, so this is an issue with a number of machines. Is there a way to set the BIOS service tag from a Linux command line? I know about the asset.com /s switch, but booting each box into DOS is not really a reasonable solution. Does your distro have the SMBios tools? I use Debian, and with the libsmbios-bin package I have a tool called `serviceTag` which spits out, and allows you to change, the Dell service tag for the box. The package also has many other useful tools in it, so it's worth installing. Cheers. Dameon. -- ooOoo Dr. Dameon Wagner, Senior ICT Specialist, Depts. of Computer Science Information Systems, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. :Beta tester for Pegasus Mercury/32 (www.pmail.com): ooOoo ___ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
Re: Third-party drives not permitted on Gen 11 servers
to the list this time (sorry Eric ;-) ... On Tue, Feb 09, 2010 at 11:15:55PM -0600, Eric Rostetter scribbled in RE: Third-party drives not permitted on Gen 11 servers: Quoting howard_sho...@dell.com: In the case of Dell's PERC RAID controllers, we began informing customers when a non-Dell drive was detected with the introduction of PERC5 RAID controllers in early 2006. I'm fine with this. And I'm fine if your tech support won't support that configuration, or if that configuration voids my warrenty, and even if your OpenManage software won't support it. But I still want to be able to make it work in the machine at my own peril... I don't mind if I have to do something in the PERC controller setup menus to force it to accept the non-Dell drive. I don't care if I have to set a jumper on the PERC card to get it to accept the non-Dell drive. I'm willing to jump through hoops to disable this in the rare case I need to. But I still want that option. I agree. This isn't proprietary software, it's hardware -- I didn't buy a license to use the application, I bought a physical piece of hardware, it's _mine_ -- I should be able to any damn thing I like with it, especially when it's something standards compliant, like putting a SATA disk into a SATA drive bay. If neither piece of kit are faulty, _it_should_just_work_ (configuration aside). While I would settle for the situation where I have to dig into the RAID BIOS somewhere to allow 3rd party disks, I wouldn't be particularly happy about it. At most there should be an informational notice that alerts me to the fact that in that configuration the disks themselves wouldn't be covered by Dell's warranty (using this scenario). I would also disagree if it voided any warranty -- I'm not a child, I've worked in this business for years, I'm trained in this stuff, swapping a disk out doesn't require a PhD, neither does realising that this is an abhorrent business practice with no true merit to the customer. Cheers. Dameon. -- ooOoo Dr. Dameon Wagner, Senior ICT Specialist, Depts. of Computer Science Information Systems, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. :Beta tester for Pegasus Mercury/32 (www.pmail.com): ooOoo ___ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
