[nycbug-talk] Fwd: Adaptec AAC raid support

[Isaac Levy]

Hi Bjorn, All,

On Mar 21, 2005, at 2:53 PM, Bjorn Nelson wrote:

> .Ike,
>
> On Mar 21, 2005, at 2:40 PM, Isaac Levy wrote:
>> The FreeBSD support for Adaptec stuff is in the end, not so exiting.   
>> The aac driver feels solid, (I have 2 sata cards in FreeBSD  
>> production now), but the mgmt. utils are a bit wonkie- it would be  
>> REALLY GREAT imo to have drivers available which are solidly written  
>> from the ground up, to work with various built-in disk utilities  
>> (i.e. atacontrol vs. the aaccli wonkie stuff I'm using now...)-
>
> Why do you consider the aaccli utility wonkie?
>
> -Bjorn

Well, it's not that it's altogether bad, but I personally prefer very  
minimal/clean systems on a server, so the following aspects of aaccli  
are simply things I'd love to do away with:

- One has to install aaccli separately (from ports, ok, not rocket  
science, but it's one more thing...)
- No manual entry for aaccli
- The aaccli utility itself, in interactive mode, feels like an AppleII  
cli app in it's design (not even curses based, apps with no forgiveness  
to backspace, etc..., bug me)
   - since it's rare that I use this utility interactively, takes me a  
sec to remember how to use it when I do...
+ The aaccli utility is simply scriptable, by feeding it  
return-deliniated textual commands, which is what I've done for  
common/checkup tasks (I wrapped the text in shell scripts).  Trivial  
enough, but again, just one more thing to do...
- It took me about 30 minutes to figure out how to use aaccli in the  
first place, reading through the help and trial-error with commands in  
interactive mode.

--
All of that, I compare that to the simplicity of the builtin  
atacontrol(8) utility on FreeBSD:

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi? 
query=atacontrol&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+4.11- 
stable&format=html
-or-
http://tinyurl.com/5rx43

It behaves just like any other unix utility, so to me, it's more  
attractive.

I'd just personally rather use atacontrol than aaccli- but aaccli and  
the Adaptec SATA cards I've got are working just great, no serious  
complaints, running solid in some of my production boxen.

My .02? and whining- but you asked for it ;)  (why do you ask btw?)

Rocket-
.ike