PERC 2/DC (was No Subject)

[J. Epperson]

On Mon, May 5, 2008 11:24, 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/
>
> 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...
>
> 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.
>

AFAIK, Array Manager could manage Windows and Netware systems only. 
There's a Dellmgr package that can do fairly primitive management of these
legacy pre-megaraid_mbox cards.  IMHO it's not worth it, partly because
the original megaraid driver  has fallen off the distribution cart any
number of times, either gets left out of the distro or the install is
hosed with busted modprobe.conf and/or initrd.  I'm surprised you got
current Linux and OMSA releases installed on the box without major
stumbling blocks.

On my personal machines I've replaced PERC 2 cards with PERC 3/DC cards
bought off eBay.  You can forward port the disks/arrays from a 2/DC to a
3/DC (but you can't port them back).  Dunno if you can manage them with
OMSA.  I thought the 6th gen (e.g. 2600) machines were the oldest
supported by recent OMSA releases.

Hope this is useful information.