RM NASBOX - Does anyone have any experience?

[JSpaced]

Hi all,

We're a small but busy PRU in Essex and prior to my being involved in the IT we had a history of inheriting "adequate" hardware as part of some overall strategic plan for the County.

I mention this to begin with because it means we've also inherited a lot of old technology that we can't always afford to instantly replace.

 

We have an RM NASBOX C which we recently re-imaged to Server 2012 and adopted as our "backup server". It's at least 5 years old (records are patchy going back before my time).

SO: the RAID alarm came on today and RM's technical advice for fixing it yourself is: "DON'T! Call us and we'll send an engineer to swap out the drive."

 

I don't really want to bring RM in. We're not an RM school anymore, we don't pay for their support. I'm happy replacing the Hard Disk. I've probably got working spares in the office I could deploy to it.

 

What I'm looking for is advice and previous experience for working with the primitive RM NASBox RAID system, particularly identifying and replacing the failed Hard Disk.

 

Has anybody out there looked at this before?

 

Many thanks in advance.

 

J

[foofighterjim]

I had one of these at my old site and had constant problems; I had replacement drives, SATA cables and new RAID Cards (all under warranty) the stupid thing was still unreliable after all of that. From what I can find the NASBOX C should have an LSI 8704ELP RAID controller, I would see if there is any documentation around for the beep sequence meaning.

 

On startup there should be the option of opening the LSI RAID Utility which should provide more information and give you the ability to silence the alarm at least. Hopefully it will also let you know if any of the dives have failed, this type of NASBOX also has background consistency checking enabled by default.

 

Not exactly helpful I know but it should give you a starting point.

[cpjitservices]

Replace the drives ?

[JoHimself]

Replace the drives ?

 

I think identifying the drive to replace may be the issue. Are there serial numbers listed in the RAID software/RAID utility?

[JSpaced]

I think identifying the drive to replace may be the issue. Are there serial numbers listed in the RAID software/RAID utility?

 

First off, thank you foofighterjim, cpjitservices and JoHimself. Appreciate the replies. The server is so old, RM doesn't hold component info for me either!

Thank you for the info on the LSI RAID board. I will look into that.

@JoHimself - yep, identifying the drive is the issue. It's a very cut-down server, no individual HDD activity lights, for example.

 

Ideally I need a new one but there you go.

[JSpaced]

On startup there should be the option of opening the LSI RAID Utility which should provide more information and give you the ability to silence the alarm at least.

 

"Oh, it's the warning lights! I'm getting rid of those. They never stop."

[foofighterjim]

"Oh, it's the warning lights! I'm getting rid of those. They never stop."

 

It is helpful to do when you know there is a problem but don't want to be deaf by the end of the day. You just need to remember to turn it back on once you are done!

[cpjitservices]

Has it got a web interface ? or some sort of interface into the RAID controller ? is there some sort of GUI that wil tell you which one is faulty ?

[JSpaced]

Has it got a web interface ? or some sort of interface into the RAID controller ? is there some sort of GUI that wil tell you which one is faulty ?

I'll have to look into that when I'm back on site. Some documentation suggests it might have a WebBIOS interface.

J

[mjs_mjs]

There was one in a school I previously worked at. IIRC it's a chenbro case, with a standard mobo, standard psu, some standard drives and using LSI mega RAID.

 

The LSI mega raid has a software that should give you a list of errors/issues with the drives. I think the drives were standard SATA drives... from the software you can identify the ports from the boards and therefore the drives. I haven't done this in the RM NASbox thing, but done a similar thing tracing cables from controllers to drives in some of my intel servers that have/use the same RAID control without the hd lights ect... I think the software is called "megaraid storage manager". You should find the RAID controller in device manager, within compmgmt.msc to confirm model/make.

 

(it was some time ago, and I feel for you!)

[PotNoodleTech]

Had one. Retired it after 3 years. Performance was awful, reliability was awful. If I were you I'd just get rid of it as all it's going to do is cause problems and put whatever data you store on it at risk.

 

Yes they were generic cases with cheap'ish commodity motherboards and the low end raid card. It was more of a PC really, in a server case.

[JSpaced]

Thanks for all the help and advice, guys.

Turns out the LSI Megaraid storage manager was key. Once that was installed I could turn off the alarm (a progress bar has never moved slower!).

I'm not familiar with RAID so I'm googling the error: Foreign, Unknown Configuration Bad.

I've been able to right-click, choose "Set: Unknown Configuration Good" and it started rebuilding again. (After setting off the alarm again first of course!)

I think I'll replace the drive and think about replacing the server soon.

 

J