Bootstraped a Dell PowerEdge 2950 with Lenny. I was surprised by the many candies hiding on the current Debian-Installer. In spite of the eternal and recurrent internal struggle each Debian release is way better than its predecesor; and I mean way better, not just up-to-date.
The only pitfall on the installation was grub mishandling the Sas6 arrays. Two Raid-1 arrays were configured on the internal SAS6 controller. The two arrays are seen as virtual disk on the Linux side, but their names/order are reversed:
/dev/sda => contains the physical disks 2-3 (second array)
/dev/sdb => contains the physical disks 0-1 (first array)
Both me and Debian Installer got confused with the disk distribution. Grub insisted on being installed on /dev/sda and that device won’t boot the machine. After a few tries (and hours) I got grub on the boot array (the first one); the install was completed by entering the target chroot and manually issuing:
grub-install –no-floppy “(hd1)”
Lesson learned, your Sas6 won’t look for a boot sector on the second array.
Now, with the machine provisioned and running, I’m itching with curiosity about the lcd display and the ipmi implementation on the machine. Seems that you can output to the lcd from linux in a primitive and crude way.
3 Comments
I was about to blame debian
Thanks, I’m now giving this tip a try.
I have a PowerEdge 1950, and would love to know more about how to update the LCD display. Any news?
@Bill LCD is supposed to talk ipmi. I installed some of the pre-requisites (ipmitool,openipmi, and the ipmi_si module) but had little sucess with my experiments.
Clearly my ipmi setup is faulty. Other example of brokeness: snmp gets performance data from the ipmi subsystem and I’ve got no perf data from snmp.
The two resources I found most helpful were:
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Dell_PowerEdge_2950_III#IPMI
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/341
Good luck. Please, comment back if you are able to update your LCD