Are there problems using hardware RAID with Redhat Fedora Core 4?

[Ben Scott]

On 1/19/06, hewitt_tech <hewitt_tech at comcast.net> wrote:
> I'm installing Fedora Core 4 on a Dell SC1420 server that contains a
> hardware SATA RAID controller and 3 80 GB drives. So far it appears that the
> hardware RAID (Dell Cerc /Adaptec) makes the 3 drives transparent to the OS.
> That is Linux just saw an ~148 GB drive and installed on it without
> complaints.

  Yes.  That's generally the way I prefer to do RAID.  (Actually,
SCSI-to-SCSI RAID is even better, but one thing at a time.)  Things
just get so much cleaner when everything sees the same presentation of
the physical storage.  Of course, driver support can be an issue, but
as long as you stick to a well-supported controller, that's usually
not an issue.

> I can see that Fedora doesn't seem to have any way to talk to
> the controller to determine if there are any drive faults but that can be
> controlled from the BIOS.

  Generally speaking, this is up to the driver, and possibly some
supplemental utilities.  For example, with MegaRAID (which includes
many Dell PERC products), the driver will generate kernel log messages
about drives failing, rebuilding, etc.  The OEM (now LSI Logic,
formerly AMI) also provides a "megamgr" binary which duplicated the
BIOS utility functionality almost exactly.

  Dell generally provides some level of support for Linux on their
servers.  That includes their OpenManage suite of management tools. 
I'd suggest trying the Dell support website.  It's fairly good, IME.

  Also, you may want to subscribe to the poweredge-linux mailing list
(also hosted by Dell).  There's a lot of good info and people on that
list.

-- Ben