[nycbug-talk] RAID anyone?

[Isaac Levy]

Wordup Dan, All,

On Dec 10, 2004, at 9:31 AM, Dan Langille wrote:

> This came out yesterday.  It's how I got my development box (the on
> that houses the beta sites for FreshPorts, FreeBSDDiary, FreshSource,
> etc):
>
>    http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a//bsd/2004/12/09/raid.html
>
> :)

Solid article Dan!  I recently went through similar fun with an Adaptec 
2410SA- which I believe is a similar card to the one you used in the 
article, except it's Serial ATA.

I'm eager to see Part 2 of the article,
"In my next article, I'll show you how I created a NetSaint plugin to 
monitor and report upon my RAID array." - I had no idea NetSaint had 
RAID monitoring facilities- will be very exited to read this when it's 
out...

--
Wanted to give a quick shout out re. Monitoring tools- The box I'm 
running the 2410SA on is a web-server, extremely minimal FreeBSD 
software base, so we're using aaccli to monitor/manage the RAID:

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/url.cgi?ports/sysutils/aaccli/pkg-descr

It's a nice stand-alone package, but the actual app is fairly crude.  
The app is a bit clunky to get using, but you can feed it scripts 
(using some fairly clunky syntax), but we found it really easy to stuff 
aaccli script text into a few shell scripts, which was all we wanted 
for the kind of notification/reporting we needed- minimal fuss, 
standalone app.  This app is reported to work with a lot of raid cards, 
btw.

--
I also tried out the asr-utils package with the card, which seem to 
work great,

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/url.cgi?ports/sysutils/asr-utils/pkg-descr

And I gotta say, all that X11 just wasn't Kosher on the server- so we 
wiped it all before putting the box online.  I'd think that the 
asr-utils would be peachy to manage raid volumes on a machine whose 
primary life is lived with a monitor plugged into it... a workstation 
or server with a head.

--
Anyhow, also, a shout out to Matador for recommending the 2410SA months 
ago on thisere' list,
http://lists.nycbug.org/pipermail/talk/2004-September/002612.html

My client chose to snag one of these cards based  on this glowing 
review, and a bit of homework...

Rocket-
.ike