debian on PowerEdge SC1435

[Marcus Bointon]

On 27 Apr 2007, at 21:44, John Heim wrote:

> 1. raid and  temperature monitoring
> 2. BIOS configuration
>
> Questions:
> 1. Should I use hardware or software raid?

Generally hardware RAID is almost always superior to software, so if  
you've got it, use it. Hardware RAID may be completely self-contained  
and OS independent, which makes it very compatible, but not  
necessarily the easiest thing to monitor.

> 2. Are there utilities available that work under debian for  
> monitoring raid
> events if I use hardware raid?
> 3. Same for temperature monitoring

The Dell OMSA package is generally only available for RedHat and  
SuSE, but there is a Debian port that has mostly worked for me on  
Ubuntu on a PE1850. I say mostly because it doesn't recognise the  
hardware controller for some reason, though it works fine on some  
more recent Dell boxes. However, LSI's megarc package sees it just  
fine. OMSA lets you get all kinds of system info, such as RAID  
controller and disk data, temperatures, PSU status and all kinds of  
other stuff. There is a big GUI app for it which I've never used, but  
there is also a simple command line utility called omreport that does  
as much as is needed.

You can get debian OMSA by adding this to your sources.list:

deb ftp://ftp.sara.nl/pub/sara-omsa dell sara

then doing 'apt-get update; apt-get install dellomsa'. After that  
'omreport -?' will get you going.

LSI megarc is available here (you might need to search for your  
particular controller, but much of the software on this page seems  
generic):
http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/products_home/internal_raid/ 
megaraid_scsi/megaraid_scsi_3202x/index.html?remote=1&locale=EN

megarc is listed under "Miscellaneous, and the generic "linux" binary  
worked ok for me. The docs are a bit hard to read in places, but  
there's a simplified version here: http://www.dubuque.k12.ia.us/it/ 
megarc/

I don't know any solutions for event based monitoring, but polling  
RAID status hourly is sufficient for my needs, which megarc can do  
nicely.

This is all new to me, but I've had some great tips from this list  
that have got me going pretty quickly.

HTH,

Marcus
-- 
Marcus Bointon
Synchromedia Limited: Creators of http://www.smartmessages.net/
UK resellers of info at hand CRM solutions
marcus at synchromedia.co.uk | http://www.synchromedia.co.uk/