I’ve got a dell blade (1955 or 1855 or something) that has a failed SAS disk and I need to get into the RAID array config without rebooting. The box runs debian etch 64bit. While dell has this crafty linux site with lots of info, it’s pretty rpm-based distro oriented (redhat/sles). There are some debian bits hiding in places though like omsa contributions here. (Be sure to go to IdeaStorm and vote for better debian support for OMSA here and here.) OMSA is the “Open Manage Server Administrator”. It looks pretty java oriented. I installed dellomsa_5.1.0-5_amd64.deb from here though, roughly following these directions.

It’s worth noting that the RAID is the new (PERC 5? PERC 6?) “generation” of SAS RAID, using the MPT Fusion drivers LSI. lspci provides “LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS1068 PCI-X Fusion-MPT SAS (rev 01)” so I tried using the MegaCLI tools but there’s a lack of documentation and I had to download an rpm, extract it, and try trunning the MegaCli and MegaCli64 tools by hand, which both said I had no controllers (‘MegaCli64 -adpcount’ I think). This uses the ‘mptsas’ kernel module

Theres a qwoot dell wiki project that links to some docs on OMSA. The standard dell download interface totally pisses me off, as it’s table design is hard to read and often broken like here where a lot of the links just go to gpg signatures.

I couldn’t get logged into the web interface, which you start with /etc/init.d/dsm_om_connsvc and runs on port 1311. If you’re connecting and getting a “application/octetstream” MIME type download prompt, it’s probably because you’re not using ssl and it is, reconnect with ‘https://ip.ip.ip.ip:1311’. It’s pointed out here that password information is stored in /opt/dell/srvadmin/iws/config/iws.ini but doesn’t appear to be used. It looks like PAM is used, but I didn’t get so far as to debug PAM to make sure it was getting hit. Just try logging in with the root/rootpassword credentials.

I tried using omreport and whatnot in /opt/dell/srvadmin/oma/bin (use omhelp to get information on onreport, ie: omreport chassis info), but these tools said they couldn’t find any controllers or chassis info. I’m not sure whats msising there.

I removed those debs then installed dellomsa_5.1.0-2_i386.deb with ‘dpkg –force-architecture -i dellomsa_5.1.0-2_i386.deb’ as it’s i386 and this is amd64. Now ‘omreport chassis info’ brought back real data. ‘omreport system summary’ is useful, but ‘omreport storage controller’ still reports ‘No controllers found’.

Maybe I’ll go back to working with the megacli stuff. I wish I could get source instead of rpms.

Seriously people. What the hell is the use of a RAID controller that I’ve got to shut the box down to manage?

update: this looks common (1, 2, 3), I searched the linux-poweredge dell mailing list. Looks like an etch thing, mebbe an etch 64 thing. I just rebooted the box and rebuilt from the bios.

update2: Rainer pointed out on the poweredge list here that he needed to load mptctl before dataeng. so ‘ /etc/init.d/dataeng stop ; modprobe mptctl ; /etc/init.d/dataeng start’ got the storage portion of omreport working for me. Also Bas van der Vlies asked if I had tried their packages so I removed the i386 dellomsa, reinstalled the latest package from their distro on sara.nl (dellomsa_5.2.0-2_amd64.deb) and that worked alright. Interestingly ‘omreport storage controller’ says the array state is degraded. I put a new disk in last night and started the sync in BIOS, so I’m curious if it didn’t finish.

I still can’t login to the web portion, but this is good enough.

update3: noted that he’s arranged many of these notes in a secret clean wiki here, the FAQ has many of the same tips without my rambling. This includes the bits that I figured out from mail list posts on how to get the IWS (web) login working correctly, which I documented here.