Following my prescriptions the
company where I work for has bought two hard drives for one of
the
servers we use for website hosting. The two drives are with
capacity of 80GB. Yesterday I spend
part of the day communicating with the tech support in the
colocation center in
(Evolink)
Sofia
Thanks God the hardware raid building has been succesfully managed
by one of my colleagues working in Evolink.
However he mentioned that some kind of warnings were present in the
previous existing RAID 1 array.
To be honest I've never thought before about monitoring the RAID
array, before the tech support
guy suggested. To build the hardware array during boot, (Kalin),
that's how the technical support in Evolink
is called, he had to download the cd with software for our IBM
xseries 8670, and then boot up from the cd
following the instructions in the Server manual to build the array.
Anyways that obviously went smoothly
as I've already said. Taking in consideration his suggestions of
monitoring the drives in the RAID array.
I did some research in Google and came across the following
Ubuntu's forums thread
Monitoring
utility for IBM ServerRAID .
The thread dealt with converting the original RPM package bundled
on the IBM software original CD to
a deb package in order to make it properly installable and
integrated into debian based systems (debian, ubuntu).
Since our current OS of choice on the IBM server is Debian Etch
linux, I had the follow the part in the Article
from the post dealing with 32 bit rpm package conversion.
Everything explained in the forum worked out-of-the-box
happily, no settle backs occured. Thus I'll present the steps here
literally required to be partaked to achieve
the proper install:
1. Download the IBM ServerRAID application CD from
IBM Support's Website
Link to the ISO at the time of writting this post can be obtained
from
IBM ServerRAID application CD ,
just make sure you use a browser and accept the license agreement
before the download proceeds
2. Install the following 3 packages,
# apt-get install alien fakeroot libstdc++5
3. link sort required, cause in Redhat sort is located on a
different place
# ln -s /usr/bin/sort /bin/sort
4.Mount the downloaded iso
# mount -o loop ibm_sw_srapp_9.00-16973_anyos_32-64.iso
/media/cdrom
5. Copy rpm to /some/directory and convert it to .deb package
# cp /media/cdrom/linux/manager/RaidMan-9.00.i386.rpm
/some/directory
# cd /some/directory
# fakeroot alien -c RaidMan-9.00.i386.rpm
Next tweak some scripts to make it Debian/Ubuntu native
6.
# mkdir -p raidman_9.00-1_i386/DEBIAN
7.
# dpkg -x raidman_9.00-1_i386.deb raidman_9.00-1_i386/
8.
# dpkg -e raidman_9.00-1_i386.deb raidman_9.00-1_i386/DEBIAN
9.
# vim raidman_9.00-1_i386/DEBIAN/postinst
10.
# (remove the line containing "chkconfig --add raid_agent"
Next open:
# vim raidman_9.00-1_i386/DEBIAN/postrm
# chkconfig --del raid_agent
11.
# dpkg -b raidman_9.00-1_i386/ raidman_9.00-1_i386.deb
12. Now install the new .deb raidman package
# dpkg -i raidman_9.00-1_i386.deb
13. With God's help everything should go smoothly and now you
should have
a working raid monitoring software on your Debian Server
To start the raid agent issue the command:
# /etc/init.d/raid_agent start
Here is also a download link to
raidman_9.00-1_i386.deb