dell 2950

The Company I’m working for had/has a need for 5TB of storage, for one of the projects. We already have a powervault 220s which is attached to an 1850, its provides 4TB of storage but that was split between 2 project given around 1.7TB per project. As we are implementing a system called Hobsoft which is a production flow pipeline for feature film’s it became necessary to increase the storage by another 5TB. I gave dell a quick ring I discovered that dell recently started selling direct attached disks that would allow us to have 5TB of storage,called MD1000 which uses SAS disks.

The only problem is that it needs a new type of Scsi card that supports SAS. There was two choices,1. I could change the card in the 1850 ( not really an option, as it was in produciton) . 2. Get a new server, We were offered a 1950,but because it was a new product dell were having supply problem and could not deliver it to use for another few weeks, they upgraded us to a 2950. So as I was using ubuntu on the 1850′s I tried to install dapper(6.0.6) onto the machine. it failed , broadcom nic wasn’t detected,no module for it and the SAS scsi disk were all shown up and it failed to install correctly..

I then decided to try and rebuild the debian installer( all I really need was for it to net boot over pxe) after wrestling with making udebs, I finally gave up when debian installer crapped out because it could not find the kernel… and asking for help yeilded nothing… so I went to plan b, a very nice chap in japan had rebuild the debian sarge CD with an updated kernel etc, which happened to find the Network card and properly see the SAS scsi card and drives attached to it… So after 40 mins of install time I had the system up and running. (it was running kernel 2.6.17.9) the kernel picked up the disk array ~5TB approx.
Trying to partition it with fdisk didn’t work so I had to do it with parted.( must be something wong with fdisk). Running bonnie++ for 12+ hours and nothing weird happening, I’m ok with using this in production. (fingers crossed

My only wish for customising debian/ubuntu was to get the machine working correctly, But with the amount of hassle I endured, It was too much for me…. as I felt that as I solved one problem, 10 others popped up . This is completly nuts….