The last few days I have revisited RAID setup using the LSI Megaraid controller. These are a family of controllers called PERC by Dell, and is present in several old PowerEdge servers, and I recently got my hands on one of these. I had forgotten how to handle this RAID controller in Debian, so I had to take a peek in the Debian wiki page "Linux and Hardware RAID: an administrator's summary" to remember what kind of software is available to configure and monitor the disks and controller. I prefer Free Software alternatives to proprietary tools, as the later tend to fall into disarray once the manufacturer loose interest, and often do not work with newer Linux Distributions. Sadly there is no free software tool to configure the RAID setup, only to monitor it. RAID can provide improved reliability and resilience in a storage solution, but only if it is being regularly checked and any broken disks are being replaced in time. I thus want to ensure some automatic monitoring is available.
In the discovery process, I came across a old free software tool to monitor PERC2, PERC3, PERC4 and PERC5 controllers, which to my surprise is not present in debian. To help change that I created a request for packaging of the megactl package, and tried to track down a usable version. The original project site is on Sourceforge, but as far as I can tell that project has been dead for more than 15 years. I managed to find a more recent fork on github from user hmage, but it is unclear to me if this is still being maintained. It has not seen much improvements since 2016. A more up to date edition is a git fork from the original github fork by user namiltd, and this newer fork seem a lot more promising. The owner of this github repository has replied to change proposals within hours, and had already added some improvements and support for more hardware. Sadly he is reluctant to commit to maintaining the tool and stated in my first pull request that he think a new release should be made based on the git repository owned by hmage. I perfectly understand this reluctance, as I feel the same about maintaining yet another package in Debian when I barely have time to take care of the ones I already maintain, but do not really have high hopes that hmage will have time to spend on it and hope namiltd will change his mind.
In any case, I created a draft package based on the namiltd edition and put it under the debian group on salsa.debian.org. If you own a Dell PowerEdge server with one of the PERC controllers, or any other RAID controller using the megaraid or megaraid_sas Linux kernel modules, you might want to check it out. If enough people are interested, perhaps the package will make it into the Debian archive.
There are two tools provided, megactl for the megaraid Linux kernel module, and megasasctl for the megaraid_sas Linux kernel module. The simple output from the command on one of my machines look like this (yes, I know some of the disks have problems. :).
# megasasctl a0 PERC H730 Mini encl:1 ldrv:2 batt:good a0d0 558GiB RAID 1 1x2 optimal a0d1 3067GiB RAID 0 1x11 optimal a0e32s0 558GiB a0d0 online errs: media:0 other:19 a0e32s1 279GiB a0d1 online a0e32s2 279GiB a0d1 online a0e32s3 279GiB a0d1 online a0e32s4 279GiB a0d1 online a0e32s5 279GiB a0d1 online a0e32s6 279GiB a0d1 online a0e32s8 558GiB a0d0 online errs: media:0 other:17 a0e32s9 279GiB a0d1 online a0e32s10 279GiB a0d1 online a0e32s11 279GiB a0d1 online a0e32s12 279GiB a0d1 online a0e32s13 279GiB a0d1 online #
In addition to displaying a simple status report, it can also test individual drives and print the various event logs. Perhaps you too find it useful?
In the packaging process I provided some patches upstream to
improve installation and ensure
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