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Debian: Installing a RAID CLI Console on an Intel Server for LSI RAID Fusion MPT

Practice



So, we have a server with a controller that identifies itself as "LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS1078 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS" or something similar. In my case it was a SAS1078. The server has hardware RAID built in, and naturally we want to monitor and manage it from the OS.

Our OS is Debian. Specifically, in my case it was Xen 4.1.3 + Debian 6 Squeeze.

We head over to the Intel website and see that the company only bothered with the bare minimum support for its products - utilities and drivers are available ONLY for Windows and Redhat. There's no support for Debian or for any other server OS. Sad.


Solution

I did find a solution eventually - immense thanks to the site http://hwraid.le-vert.net/wiki/DebianPackages.

We go into /etc/apt and edit the sources.list file, adding the following line to it:
deb http://hwraid.le-vert.net/debian squeeze main

Here, instead of "/debian" you can specify "/ubuntu" if you're using Ubuntu instead of Debian, and instead of "squeeze" you can specify your own distribution, for example "lenny".

Now let's update the repos:
$ sudo apt-get update

and install the utility we need - in our case it's called lsiutil:
$ sudo apt-get install lsiutil


Checking

$ sudo lsiutil

LSI Logic MPT Configuration Utility, Version 1.56, March 19, 2008

1 MPT Port found

     Port Name         Chip Vendor/Type/Rev    MPT Rev  Firmware Rev  IOC
1.  /proc/mpt/ioc0    LSI Logic SAS1078 C2      105      011b0000     0

Select a device:  [1-1 or 0 to quit] quit

Okay, our controller is visible and we can proceed. By the way - you can work here through a menu, which is far more convenient than the MegaRAID CLI (no need to fumble with the MegaRAID CLI or the easy-to-understand CLI of something like Cisco - MegaCLI is significantly less convenient).

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