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[Matt Domsch]

On Mon, May 05, 2008 at 10:24:55AM -0500, Shane Corbin wrote:
> I have a Dell Poweredge 6450 with a PERC 2/DC raid controller.  I have installed
> the newest version of omsa available for debian through the apt repository
> ftp://ftp.sara.nl/pub/sara-omsa/

OMSA 5.x shouldn't support the 6450 any more.  It's what, 7+ years old now?
 
> The web interface works great and so do the om utilities.  Except for one thing. 
> The om utils do not recognize teh PERC 2/DC as a storage controller.  All of my
> disks are managed with the PERC 2/DC due to the fact that the embedded AIC-7899P
> controller is not raid capable.  This is the main reason for using these utilities.
>  When a drive goes bad, I have to powerdown the machine in order to enter the
> controller bios to silence the alarm, rebuild array, etc...

You could hook up the drives to the aic7xxx controller and use Linux
software RAID.  I've recommended this to people who have such old
hardware for several years now.  The drive bays themselves are
electrically hot-pluggable, and mdadm can be used to kick off the logical
add/remove/rebuild commands.
 
> If anyone has any experience with the PERC 2/DC controller with the om utils please
> help.  Dell tech support mentioned that I may need to use the array manager, I do
> not see an "Array Manager."  Before switching to debian linux, the omsa installed
> with windows server 2003 managed this controller just fine.

Array Manager was the Windows-only application, predating OMSA's
inclusion of Storage Services, that was intended to manage that
hardware.  As noted above, OMSA 5.x no longer supports that hardware.


-- 
Matt Domsch
Linux Technology Strategist, Dell Office of the CTO
linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux