I recently upgraded Dell OMSA to 6.0.1 on a number of Ubuntu Intrepid and Jaunty hosts using sara.dl’s packages and got a warning that the mptsas driver version 3.04.07 was below the minimum supported version. The version from ‘modinfo mptsas’ confirmed I was on the right track looking at this driver. A quick look revealed no update in 2.6.29.4 or 2.6.30-rc8, so I went searching for the drivers source.
LSI’s site is terrible. I have Dell 1955 blades, and the Dell SAS5/iR chipsets are really LSI SAS1068s. I searched the drivers page for SAS1068 eventually and found the right download page. I grabbed the 4.18.00 archive file.
After decompressing it I found a dkms folder and rpm. I eventually gave up and used this to build a dkms deb with the following commands:
sudo apt-get install dkms
sudo rpm -i mptlinux-4.18.00.00-1dkms.noarch.rpm --no-deps
sudo dkms mkdeb -m mptlinux -v 4.18.00.00
scp /var/lib/dkms/mptlinux/4.18.00.00/deb/mptlinux-dkms_4.18.00.00_all.deb OTHERHOST:
Then install that deb on the otherhost (with the LSI based chipset) and it will install the correct modules via dkms. I rebooted and used modinfo to verify that mptsas was now version 4.18.00 and ‘omreport storage controller’ now reports ‘Ok’ instead of ‘Degraded’ again.
It seems all sorts of tools require LSI’s 4.x drivers. With my IBM blades in order to upgrade the firmware to avoid noted critical errors I had to install LSI’s driver in order to do it from within Linux.
Be sure to check for firmware upgrades, at least with IBM’s HS21 there’s noted firmware problems with 1068 that cause mirrored volumes to go offline in the event of a failed member. Less than desirable.
I wonder they they’re not getting this driver upstream?
Yeah. Dell OMSA reported the whole driver issue in the first place, when it normally reports firmware issues. I have nagios checking omreport in omsa so I get notifications when the raid has firmware/driver/actual issues.