Help install OpenFiller

[Tricky_Dicky]

Hi,

 

I'm trying to install OpenFiller on to an Intel SSR212 and running into trouble.

 

The disc starts up and I can walk through the GUI installer without any problems, setting up the partitions as defined in the guide, however when I then reboot it boots back into the windows that was previously installed.

 

When I looked a bit closer what seems to be happening is that I'm trying to install OpenFiller onto the 10tb raid instead of the two mirrored HDDs that the Windows OS is installed on. However having re-run the installer it can't see this smaller drive and therefore let me install on to it.

 

Anyone got any ideas or experience with this?

 

Thanks

Rich

[dhicks]

When I looked a bit closer what seems to be happening is that I'm trying to install OpenFiller onto the 10tb raid instead of the two mirrored HDDs that the Windows OS is installed on. However having re-run the installer it can't see this smaller drive and therefore let me install on to it.

 

Does the server provide "proper" hardware RAID for that boot volume, or some kind of software-dependant RAID that only works with Windows drivers? Did you install Windows on this machine yourself - do you remember having to provide a driver disk during the install process?

 

--

David Hicks

[Tricky_Dicky]

Hi David,

 

It came installed with windows 2003R2 on it, so the simple answer is I don't I'm afraid.

 

Trying to find any information on the actual hardware is proving tricky. I would have hoped that it's proper Raid hardware though as the machine was designed to be a storage device.

 

Any idea how to inject the drivers in to Open filler or should I look for another solution?

 

Rich

[dhicks]

Trying to find any information on the actual hardware is proving tricky.

 

Can you get to a command line to get a list of PCI devices?

 

Any idea how to inject the drivers in to Open filler or should I look for another solution?

 

I don't know much about OpenFiler - all our file servers are Ubuntu or Debian. If the OpenFiler install routine doesn't spot your harddrive then there might not be much hope. I'm just about to try and sort out an Ubuntu file server with a Dell SAS 5 hardware RAID controller installed, I'll see how far I get with that.

 

--

David Hicks

[ind1ekid]

Could try Nexenta as an alternative, supposed to be a bit easier to use than OF, but "apparently" a bit pickier when it comes to the hardware.

 

Pretty decent How To on OpenFiler here that you might want to bookmark - OpenFiler How To

[Tricky_Dicky]

I haven't been able to get to a command line yet.

 

I'm going to do some digging and see if I can find some sort of setup in the Raid config. From what I can tell in addition to the main Raid volume it has a pair of mirrored disks which are showing up in the hardware Raid at boot but not in the openfiller congifuration and I am wondering if this is because of the way they are formatted. They currently have Windows Server and so I'm presuming a Fat file system, if I was to format these in the Bios somehow maybe it would see them then.

 

Will keep you informed. Good luck with the Dell.

[dhicks]

I haven't been able to get to a command line yet.

 

Might it be easier to switch to a different Linux distribution - Ubuntu Server or similar? You could certainly try running the Ubuntu installer, at least, then you'd know if it can see the disks you're expecting. Hardware RAID support (i.e. getting RAID array status reports, the machine should see any hardware RAID arrays as individual disks, of course) under Ubuntu turns out to be way easier than I thought it was going to be. After wading through reams of documentation and downloading and installing several different tools, it turns out all I needed to do was "modprobe mptctl" to make sure the hardware RAID monitoring module was loaded, then "apt-get install mpt-status" to install the command-line utility to give status reports. Now, simply typing "mpt-status" shows me a RAID status - easy enough to turn that into a monitoring tool of some kind that checks the status every few minutes and lets me know if something is wrong.

 

--

David Hicks