Installing hardware RAID monitor on IBM xseries 345 model 8670, IBM Server RAID monitoring via IBM’s RAID software RaidMan on 32 bit (i386) Debian Etch

Friday, 16th October 2009

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 check the warning messages the raid array issues.

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 already mentioned. Taking in consideration his suggestions for 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 of IBM’s hardware monitoring software:

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

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5 Responses to “Installing hardware RAID monitor on IBM xseries 345 model 8670, IBM Server RAID monitoring via IBM’s RAID software RaidMan on 32 bit (i386) Debian Etch”

  1. Florine Hammersley says:
    Opera 9.64 Opera 9.64 Windows XP Windows XP
    Opera/9.64(Windows NT 5.1; U; en) Presto/2.1.1

    Yet another topnotch blog post! I shared this one on Twitter – you should add a “like” button to your posts. 🙂

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    • admin says:
      Epiphany 2.30.6 Epiphany 2.30.6 Debian GNU/Linux x64 Debian GNU/Linux x64
      Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.2+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/531.2+ Debian/squeeze (2.30.6-1) Epiphany/2.30.6

      thx for the suggestion, I’ll probably add a twitter like button whenever I have time.

      Best!
      Georgi

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  2. Alona Austria says:
    Opera 9.64 Opera 9.64 Windows XP Windows XP
    Opera/9.64(Windows NT 5.1; U; en) Presto/2.1.1

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  3. Lyle Cygan says:
    Internet Explorer 6.0 Internet Explorer 6.0 Windows XP Windows XP
    Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E)

    I have already been dissatisfied by free of cost website monitoring company.

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  4. servers hp says:
    Firefox 21.0 Firefox 21.0 Windows 8 x64 Edition Windows 8 x64 Edition
    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:21.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/21.0

    It's an awesome article in favor of all the online users; they will take benefit from it I am sure.

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