SOLVED: Struggles with the M1015

[rdenney]

New to this, looking to replace a SLOOOOOOOW Dlink DNS323.

 

I'm taking an old 32-bit Dell Dimension 4700. I've moved the mobo into a new case that has a large rack for hard disks. The original XP disk is sitting up in one of the big bays. It is connected to the SATA port on the mobo (there are only two).

 

The hard disk controller is an IBM M1015 that has been flashed with LSI SAS9210-8i firmware, in IT mode. It looks, smells, and acts like a plain host bus adapter, albeit with 8 independent PCI channels, one for each disk.

 

I have four 2-TB drives connected to the SAS/SATA splitter cable. In XP, I did install a driver from LSI for Windows 32-bit boxes. I can access all drives using the Disk Management utility in XP. I initialized them there, assigned a small partition on each (to save time), formatted a volume on that partition, tested it with file reads/writes (they all worked fine), and then deleted the partition to leave the disks unallocated.

 

The LSI firmware sees all four drives and reports their link speeds (two are SATA600 and two are STAT300). And all four are listed when the LSI controller boots, which it does before the mobo boots.

 

I then set up an unRAID boot thumb-drive on an old Lexar Jumpdrive (1G). I changed the boot order to start with USB, and while there noted that all four disks on the LSI controller were recognized and listed as part of the boot loading sequence.

 

dmesg reports the two mobo SATA ports, and the USB stick. There is nothing in there about SAS drives. unRAID does not list any of the four disks on the LSI controller in its web GUI, though it does list the XP hard disk (which obviously I don't want to use with unRAID--this is sort of a manual multi-boot computer for now).

 

I had a similar struggle trying to install NAS4FREE on this machine, with the PCI-e controller being detected (as reported in pciconf) but with no driver being assigned to it or the disks attached to it. That leads me to believe there is an issue with the relationship of this card to the mobo, but then why would the mobo see it and why would Windows see it? (I did have to flash a new BIOS into the mobo--I think the original version that was on the mobo only allows graphics cards in that slot--and the latest BIOS version does not have that issue with WinXP.)

 

The firmware installed on the controller is the LSI P14 release from July--the latest firmware for the LSI SAS9210-8i. I read somewhere that the driver in FreeBSD was only good for package 13, but I'm unmotivated to flash the older version on the card unless I can't get unRAID to work, either.

 

I struggle with Linux and Unix, but I'm persistent. I've invested lots of hours in this project so far but now I'm just stuck. I've ruled out a defective card, defective disks, wiring, etc.

 

Ideas would be gratefully received.

 

By the way, is there a SSH server in unRAID? Sure would be easier for copying in the scripts you guys are going to send me to solve my problem.

 

Rick "appreciative" Denney

[Influencer]

There is not an ssh server installed, but you can install one.

 

First let's start with the basics, your hardware specs and what version of unraid.

[BLKMGK]

I'm running v14 firmware with unRAID 5rc8 without issue (VT-d pas on ESXi).

[Influencer]

That's the reason I asked, m1015 was not supported on 4.7, the driver was added somewhere in the 5b releases.

[rdenney]

That's the reason I asked, m1015 was not supported on 4.7, the driver was added somewhere in the 5b releases.

 

I read all the release notes, and found nothing about it. Must have been buried in one of the Linux kernel upgrades. This is the answer I needed.

 

I was using 4.7, but I just upgraded it to 5rc8a. Then, my 8169-based NIC went silent. I found this thread:

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=22615.msg201529#msg201529

 

Apparently, somebody much smarter than me re-inserted the rl8169 driver into the kernel. Now I have network access.

 

The new web GUI looks very nice compared to 4.7, by the way.

 

And I now see all four disks. Time to check it out and see if I want to upgrade to Pro to include all four of those disks in the array. I'm assuming that this beta version, as modified by somebody much smarter than me, can be upgraded to Pro to add the additional disks. It appears that it's a secret setting, plus a different GUI with more holes in it for array drives (etc.), so all versions are probably equally upgradeable.

 

Thank you for your help!

 

Rick "in business" Denney

[BLKMGK]

Upgrading is simply the addition of a license file to enable features, it will be tied to your USB key so choose a good one. If it fails it can take a day or three to get a replacement and Tom may ask you to ship back the dead stick.

 

Do take a look at the various plugins including the Simple Features one which improves the GUI significantly!

[rdenney]

Upgrading is simply the addition of a license file to enable features, it will be tied to your USB key so choose a good one. If it fails it can take a day or three to get a replacement and Tom may ask you to ship back the dead stick.

 

Do take a look at the various plugins including the Simple Features one which improves the GUI significantly!

 

Actually, I had already found unMENU, which was the plugin manager for the APC UPS plugin. I just installed Simple Features and it does indeed spiff up the GUI and add a few critical features.

 

The thumb drive I'm using now is an ancient 1G Lexar Jumpdrive--it was big and expensive at the time I bought it. I have not used it much, though. I expect it's good enough to last a good long time. But I'll look at the store today to see if something smaller pops out at me. I'm assuming that (with the Basic server) one can just format the drive,  copy over all the files and folder from one to the other, and run "make_bootable" again. Easy enough to just try it.

 

This is a pretty cheap NAS. I got the old Dell for free, put it in a $40 case that has 8 3.5" drive slots, mounted $20 worth of fans in it, added some RAM, and installed the four 2T drives. I'm moving the SSD I'd set up for NAS4FREE (which is now going bye-bye) to my main workstation to use as a scratch disk for Photoshop. I have less than $100 in the box plus drives. The only limitation I see (other than the size of the box) is that it won't span drives, which would be nice for my automatic backup system. But I can live without that.

 

Rick "finally ready to put the covers on this box" Denney