Not sure if I'm lucky or cursed but my work brings a fair amount of redundant kit my way. Most units are really only fit for the skip, but this particular unit caught my eye. It's a Dell PowerEdge 2300 which at the time of writing (early 2006) is already outdated and not fit for production use. However this box looks like it will make a decent development server as it has six disk caddies (five occupied).
Task #1 backup the last known production data (you just never know when a client is gonna change their mind), ship one copy off to the customer on CD, stash one CD away in a corner of the cavern and stow a copy in a dark corner of a production server in a file labelled 'shopping-list'.
ok, now we're ready - a quick whizz round the box reveals we have 5 HDD units, 2x4GB configured as RAID-1 and 3x9GB as RAID-5 on a pci SCSI card known in DELL-land as PERC 2/SC. Not much by today's standards but still servicable for a dev box. There's also two on-board SCSI controllers, one has a CD-Rom and a DDS-3 tape drive, the other is unused at present. There's also one floppy unit, a pci-NIC of unknown origin and the mobo appears to sport a servicable VGA port.
Whack in breezy (ubuntu 5.10) and fire the go button .... whizz, clunkety, etc, all progresses as smooth as a slippery thing sliding along a very slippery track then stop - the partitioner can't find any disks.
A reboot confirms all disks are where they should be.... a retry gives the same result - no disks. Rummaging around the toolbox I find a fairly recent gentoo CD. With more hope than expectation the gentoo disk is loaded and again the box is rebooted. The result is ... still no hard drives.
Time for a sanity check - out comes the XP CD from the partner program package. load, fire and ... goes in first time. oh well a spare XP is needed for a quick project test so the box lives for a while and I think no more about it for a few days....
Having finished being mercilesly abused as an XP hack, the box once again has my attention. A trawl around the web and usenet archives reveals a few poor souls facing similar issues but no solution...one chap managed to get the RAID working by changing the module identity from Mass Storage
to I20
- not useful, mine is already set to I20. The future isn't looking good for the Dell, choices seem to be limted to Windows 2003 Server edition or the skip and we have no need of another WS3 box.
Dunno about you but I find a good nights sleep reveals the world in a new light. Rather than floundering about as previously, I set about the box with a purpose. Exposing its innards to the world reveals the the Disk subsystem connects to the PERC controller with nice long SCSI cable - astonishingly it looks like a fiarly standard cable and BINGO it simply fits (no adapters needed) straight onto the spare adaptec channel - thank you DELL for not screwing around with this bit.
Just a few routine tasks including enabling/configuring the SCSI channel and reconfiguring the PERC unit so it doesn't confuse the O/S with ghost HD units and we're in business.
Without further ado, Neptune (yes - I'm feeling confident enough to give the box a name now) is loaded with breezy once again - this time she loads in one - no hint of issue, hiccup or problem.
Some thoughts about ubuntu - it would be good IMO if SSH was included in the base install. Anyhow, I need to frig about with the mounted disks a little to get best use out of them, but that's for another day.