From owner-freebsd-hardware  Sat Dec  7 14:20:58 2002
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Date: Sat, 07 Dec 2002 14:20:39 -0800
Subject: Promise RAID controller
From: Michael DeMan <michael@staff.openaccess.org>
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Hi All,

We are using Promise RAID controllers built on motherboards.  These provide
simple RAID-1 mirroring for us.

We had a disk fail a couple of weeks ago, and it took the whole system down.
The console was still up, but the machine was unresponsive over the network.
Looking at the console, it reported a hard-disk write error on the second
IDE drive in the RAID configuration, on the swap partition.

This was not a good thing, as we had to drive to our data center and find
out what was wrong.

My assumption would be that the RAID controller would respond and
automatically detach a bad disk.

Is anybody else working with the Promise controllers (device ar) in a
production environment and found a way around this?

The only thing I can think of, is to run a cronjob to watch the log file
every couple of minutes looking for, and parsing, any disk failure messages
and then detach the drive and fire off an e-mail.

This is obviously a kludge, and it would be a lot better to pickup a signal
from the ar device driver or something if there is a failure.

Any ideas would be helpful.

- Mike


Michael F. DeMan
Director of Technology
OpenAccess Internet Services
1305 11th St., 3rd Floor
Bellingham, WA 98225
Tel 360-647-0785 x204
Fax 360-738-9785
michael@staff.openaccess.org




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