Subject: Re: [vserver] Sponsoring VServer getting up to date with mainline
From: Herbert Poetzl <herbert@13thfloor.at>
Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2008 21:44:15 +0200

On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 09:03:05PM +0200, Tom Laermans wrote:
> Herbert Poetzl wrote:
> >sounds good, I take it that you are using such cards
> >somewhere, (they are not readily available in Austria,
> >so I haven't had much personal contact with folks using
> >them, not to speak of hands-on experience), but I would
> >be interested in the following things:

> Yes, I'm using them in several boxes at work (basically all servers 
> bought since 2 years) and since a short while also in my home 
> fileserver, with great pleasure.

> > - can I create a raid description for the controller
> >   (externally) and upload that somehow?
> >   i.e. to map a preexisting raid layout
> >   (just curious, not terribly important)

> Not that I could see, I haven't used the webinterface much, mainly
> the BIOS interface, which does not provide this possibility, I think
> neither will the webinterface.

well, most BIOS interfaces nowadays are kind of
graphical ones, and that is not the best idea for
a headless server, the intel card was extremely
annoying in this regard, as it even 'required'
a mouse to be plugged in for bootup (without the
bios stuff disabled, which took me some time to
figure out :)

webinterface doesn't sound like a good idea either,
but I could live with that, but the question is,
who provides the web interface? is that something
you only get with the network enabled cards?

if it isn't too much of a problem, I would be 
interested if you can backup the raid config to
your filesystem, and if yes, how that backup
actually looks like ...

> > - can I get access to the smart values for disk in
> >   a hardware array?

> Hm, I haven't really looked into it, the temperature values are
> available through the CLI (and in the bios, and via snmp if you have
> a network-enabled card) but the rest of the SMART values are not, I
> think you can get to them via the webinterface.

could you try that for me and let me know if and
how it works?

> > - are there any restrictions on the disks (e.g. size
> >   or low level commands) when driving them in JBOD?

> Size will not matter, I'm not sure which low level commands would 

that was another problem I ran into with the intel
card, it insisted to cut away a few hundred megabytes
(which isn't such a big deal with 500GB/1TB disks),
but I couldn't access existing disks that way and
had to attach a separate controller for that purpose

> be possible or not; I don't have a JBOD configured anymore to check. 
> I think JBOD would be a waste of this controller though, assuming you 
> don't mean spanning disks ;)

no, this is not the intended setup, but it comes
really handy when you want to migrate stuff or
integrate existing setups slowly

> > - what low level tools are available to manage and
> >   monitor the arrays and disks?
> >  
> Areca provides a CLI tool for Linux (cli32/cli64) available on 
> their FTP site.
> 
> Controllers List
> ----------------------------------------
> Controller#01(PCI): ARC-1160
> Current Controller: Controller#01
> ----------------------------------------
> 
> CMD     Description
> ==========================================================
> main    Show Command Categories.
> set     General Settings.
> rsf     RaidSet Functions.
> (...)
> CLI> vsf info
>  # Name             Raid Name       Level   Capacity Ch/Id/Lun  State
> ===============================================================================
>  1 Root Volume      Khalid RAID Set Raid6     60.0GB 00/00/00   Normal
>  2 Storage Volume   Khalid RAID Set Raid6   4100.0GB 00/00/01   Normal
> ===============================================================================

looks nice, does it provide command completion
and/or command history? is the help sufficient
to find your way around?

> etc
> >any input/experience there would be really appreciated
> >(currently looking at the ARC-1680 line)
> >  
> I mainly use the 1110, 1160,  1260 but bios, linux driver & cli are 
> identical for all, as are the features I think (except for the network 
> port and the cpu speed) - apparently I don't know too much about them 
> either based on this reply ;D

all information helps and is appreciated, as I
do not have a chance to test-drive one that easily

thanks,
Herbert

> HTH,
> Tom