humbled by the SC440 and raid monitoring

[Eric Wood]

On 29 May 2008, at 1:36, David Sparks <dave at ca.sophos.com> wrote:
> Eric Wood wrote:
>> I have been completely humbled.  I've had this server put away for over
>> year and half because I could never figure out how to monitor the SAS
>> controller.
>
> Whats wrong with mpt-status?  It claims support for SAS1068. :)
>
> http://www.drugphish.ch/~ratz/mpt-status/

I got it to compile but it still could not find the controller, as I noted 
here:
http://prefetch.net/blog/index.php/2007/02/03/monitoring-lsi-logic-raid-controllers/#comments

Maybe mpt-status only supports LSI controllers - not Dell OEM'ed 
controllers.

So, last ditch effort, I updated the bios and firmware on the SC440 and SAS 
5/iR controller, and reinstalled Dell's SAS Raid Storage Manger v2.16-01 for 
RHEL5.  No luck - "No Storage Controller Found!".

Let me back up and ask this:  Since, the kernel is gratiously working the 
controller, are there not any generic commands that query the SAS subsystem 
to report back overall statuses of hard drives and raids?   I'm not a kernel 
programmer, but I just can't understand why you put all the effort into 
writing a driver which natively works with the kernel, and linux doesn't 
give you a way to inspect the most basics of information other than the 
spartan:

# cat /proc/scsi/mptsas/0
ioc0: LSISAS1068, FwRev=000a3300h, Ports=1, MaxQ=286

-eric