Linux and the Dell CERC ATA100/4ch

I have had an old Dell PowerEdge 600SC as a file/backup server that has one of these Dell-branded LSI 'raid' (I use the term loosely) cards running for years. It originally shipped with Red Hat 7 with a driver disk that allowed the use of the CERC card. It wasn't long before they dropped support for this hardware and the only way to utilize it under Linux was to compile it yourself. That being an ever increasingly painful process as Linux progressed and the CERC driver didn't, I pretty much ended up running Red Hat 8 on the machine until I decommissioned it a couple of months ago. It wasn't much of a problem since it was dead stable and I only lost a single hard drive in all the years it ran.

Now, I wanted to rebuild the old box with a shiny new OS and peddle it on eBay. Poking around a little uncovered that some folks have been getting this old raid card with a modern kernel. So, I thought, if they can do it, so can I. I rebuilt the machine with 4 partitions on the system drive (the one attached to the integrated controller). A boot, a swap and two system, a partitions gives the ability to test a second OS without mucking up the one you rely on.

Since the CERC card itself was recognized just fine, I thought it would be no problem to get the virtual drive online. Boy was I wrong. I had previously upgraded the firmware to the latest from Dell, which was published in like 2002, to get support for the 200Gb drives I had attached. No help there.

Then, I came across a single piece of information that I am going to republish here in case someone else is doing what I was trying to do and the original ever disappears. From here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=2894899

I downloaded the 'incorrect' firmware directly from LSI:
http://www.lsi.com/files/support/rsa/N661.zip

Installed it to the card, and the OS magically recognized the virtual drive. It was really that easy, though it took a few hours to track down the solution. Fedora 7 and Fedora 8 Test 3 both work splendidly right out of the box with it.

Thanks slicksurf

First Ever Blog

This is my first ever entry into the blogspace. I never really imagined myself doing this, but lately I have been searching for very specific bits of information that have been less than easy to obtain. Ultimately, the information is all aggregated from various sources into a hopefully useful package. These sources are generally quite transient, whether they are forum posts, blogs, mail list archives, usenet, etc. I don't typically have a lot to say, but what I intend to post here are things that are useful to me that someone else might be looking for.

My interests vary widely across mechanical and technical genres, but are strongest around racing, race car construction, engineering, computers and Linux. One of my personal projects around the house is a pretty nice MythTV setup.

If you have read this much, you are even more uninteresting than me.