[Wylug-discuss] Installed a PCI raid card, but not quite finished?

Wed Oct 27 10:24:10 BST 2004

Dear Nigel

>BTW Your mail server appears to be listed in some blacklists - I'm
>getting SpamAssassin positives on your mail purely due to your IP
>address, which is pretty unusual.

2 possible reasons. ndo was down for 12 hours from 21.00 Monday to 09.30 Tuesday, but that should not affect emails sent.

Emails sent are sent either direct or via mail.btinternet.com. I gather it could be because we need a new IP address. We upgraded our broadband from 512 to 1024 Kbps and BT issued a new dynamic IP address, which seems to have been an open relay. I'll try to persuade BT to issue a new IP address, but finding anyone who even knows how to wire a plug at BT is harder than finding hen's teeth.

> Thats because there is already an initrd file there - rename it out the
> way and rerun the command.

That I understand, but I got the impression I was trying to add a command to the initrd file. If I rename and run the command won't it start with an empty initrd? (Please bear with me!)

>> I have RH8,

>hopefully with updates - although I see even Fedora Legacy don't support
>RH8 any more so you are going to have significant missed updates,
>including security related ones.

Er No, so can I get the updates and if so where and is it safe to just let it update itself? Mind you we don't have anything open to the outside world except 2 fixed IP addresses. Our Mail server is on a windows XP machine - I'm a beta tester and have had it since we were on Netware, so that’s on area out of worry. Access to internet is via another PC gateway running a software Firewall. I run protection and AV software on all the client PC's.

> You shouldn't need to.  As long as the root filesystem isn't on these
> disks

It isn't

> it should simply be a case of putting the modules on a path where
> they can be seen by modprobe, adding an entry into modules.conf to cause
> those drives to be loaded, and it should just work.

I think there is just one compiled file iteraid.o, the source consisted of iteraid.h iteraid.c and Makefile. I had to edit Makefile to reflect the version of RH.

modules.conf has

alias parport_lowlevel parport_pc
alias scsi_hostadapter aic7xxx
alias scsi_hostadapter1 mptbase
alias scsi_hostadapter2 mptscsih
alias usb-controller usb-ohci
alias eth0 e1000
# Turn off mcdx modules
alias block-major-20 off
# Turn off sound
alias char-major-14 off
alias eth1 e1000

Will

install -m 644 iteraid.o /lib/modules/2.4.20-24.8/kernel/drivers/scsi/
depmod -a

do it?

> Hacking initrd is
> another way, but is likely to fall apart on the next kernel upgrade.

So I'll avoid that method.

> Personally I'd avoid an IDE card which is not supported by the
> mainstream kernel.
RH 9 supports this card according to one of the boards I've read. Anyway I got it for another purpose. When I tried using the on-board IDE it failed (stopped dead on boot up with a message about ServerWorks not liking it.) I thought it was worth a try.

>> I've edited /etc/fstab, but I cannot make my mind up if the numbers

I'll use 0 and 2 and read the manual.

Thank you

Nick

N.G. Moulsdale FCA
Group Finance Director
Ebi Manufacturing Co Ltd
Sandhill House
82 Meanwood Road
Leeds LS7 2RE
United Kingdom
*        44-(0)113-243-2448
Fax      44-(0)113-243-0504
*  Nick at ebi.ndo.co.uk

-----Original Message-----
From: Nigel Metheringham [mailto:Nigel.Metheringham at dev.intechnology.co.uk]
Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2004 4:20 PM
To: Nick Moulsdale
Cc: wylug-discuss at wylug.org.uk
Subject: Re: [Wylug-discuss] Installed a PCI raid card, but not quitefinished?

On Tue, 2004-10-26 at 15:52 +0100, Nick Moulsdale wrote:
> I have used this great help to install my 2 x 200 Gb EIDE HD's as secondary Units. Boot is from 1 of 2 SCSI 69 GB disks. I have not carried out last 2 lines above as instructions with the linux drivers say
>
> # cp -f iteraid.o /lib/modules/2.4.20-24.8/kernel/drivers/scsi
> # chmod 755 /sbin/mkinitrd
> # mkinitrd -f --preload scsi_mod --preload sd_mod --with=iteraid /boot/initrd-2.4.20-24.8.img 2.4.20-24.8
>
> 1st 2 carried out OK and then cd'd to /usr/src/ITERaid, but last one
> fails will not allow writing to img file.

Thats because there is already an initrd file there - rename it out the
way and rerun the command.

> I thought your last 2 lines might substitute, but I do not understand
> iteraid.ko. I don't think I have this file?.

Thats a kernel 2.6.x kernel module.  2.4.x and earlier uses .o files for
modules.

> I have RH8,

hopefully with updates - although I see even Fedora Legacy don't support
RH8 any more so you are going to have significant missed updates,
including security related ones.

> have downloaded the source files and modified them to match my Linux
> version. Then I compiled them, did modprobe sr_mod and modprobe
> sd_mod. insmod iteraid.o worked OK and dmesg gave the correct mesg.
> I've fdisked the 2 disks and created ext3 filesystems on them and I
> can read and write to/from them. But I do not want to have to remember
> to do this stuff again on a reboot.

You shouldn't need to.  As long as the root filesystem isn't on these
disks it should simply be a case of putting the modules on a path where
they can be seen by modprobe, adding an entry into modules.conf to cause
those drives to be loaded, and it should just work.  Hacking initrd is
another way, but is likely to fall apart on the next kernel upgrade.

> I've editted /etc/fstab, but I cannot make my mind up if the numbers
> should read
>
> defaults 1 1 or 2 2 or 0 0. I think it should be 2 2?

Nope.
First number (field 5) is backup frequency for dump - since no one would
use dump for backups (you need to take the filesystem offline to get a
stable backup using dump), you should have 0 for this field.

The second number (field 6) is the fsck pass.  Set these to 2 as
recommended in the man page:-
	man fstab
Do not set it to zero unless you understand the consequences.

Personally I'd avoid an IDE card which is not supported by the
mainstream kernel.

BTW Your mail server appears to be listed in some blacklists - I'm
getting SpamAssassin positives on your mail purely due to your IP
address, which is pretty unusual.

	Nigel.
--
[ Nigel Metheringham           Nigel.Metheringham at InTechnology.co.uk ]
[ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]

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