CentOS - Dec 2006 - Centos 4.0 (Final) and Dell 1950 with SAS controller

Hi All,

I have an "appliance" cd which uses CentOS 4.0 (Final) which I am
trying to load on a new Dell 1950 server with a SAS driver controller. During
the install it fails to find any disks to load to. I got the drivers from Dell
and dd the correct one to a floppy, boot from the appliance cd and enter linux
dd at the prompt. I load the driver in the install and it still fails to find
any disks.

I have looked at the virtual consoles after the module disk and I see some
strange information:

failed to open /tmp/drivers/modules.pcimap: no such file or directory
failed to open /tmp/drviers/pci.ids: no such file or directory
.....
modules to insert mptbase mptscsih mptsas
module(s) mptbase mptscsih mptsas not found


So the driver disk is loading but....it can't find the modules. So I went on
looking at the driver disk and found:

-rw-r--r--  1 root root     48 Dec 20  2005 disk-info
drwx------  2 root root  12288 Dec 20  2005 lost+found
-rw-r--r--  1 root root    330 Dec 20  2005 modinfo
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 817645 Dec 20  2005 modules.cgz
-rw-r--r--  1 root root    116 Dec 20  2005 modules.dep
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  52852 Dec 20  2005 packages.py
-rw-r--r--  1 root root    993 Dec 20  2005 pcitable
-rw-r--r--  1 root root     32 Dec 20  2005 rhdd

So I figured out that modules.cgz is zip and cpio'd, I undid it and this is
what is in that archive:

drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 4096 Dec 21 14:22 2.6.9-11.EL
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 4096 Dec 21 14:22 2.6.9-11.ELhugemem
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 4096 Dec 21 14:22 2.6.9-11.ELsmp
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 4096 Dec 21 14:22 2.6.9-22.EL
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 4096 Dec 21 14:22 2.6.9-22.ELhugemem
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 4096 Dec 21 14:22 2.6.9-22.ELsmp
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 4096 Dec 21 14:22 2.6.9-5.EL
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 4096 Dec 21 14:22 2.6.9-5.ELhugemem
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 4096 Dec 21 14:22 2.6.9-5.ELsmp
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 3850 Dec 20  2005 fusion.mptctl


This seemed strange to me because CentOS 4.0 uses kernel 2.6.9-5.0.3.EL. So my
question is could that be why the modules can not be found? If so what changes
do I need to make to this driver disk to get working on CentOS 4.0?

The controller is LSISAS1068

Sorry for the long post and thanks for the help.

 Glenn

--
Glenn MacGregor
HighStreet Networks

Glenn MacGregor wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I have an "appliance" cd which uses CentOS 4.0 (Final) which I am
trying to load on a new Dell 1950 server with a SAS driver controller. During
the install it fails to find any disks to load to. I got the drivers from Dell
and dd the correct one to a floppy, boot from the appliance cd and enter linux
dd at the prompt. I load the driver in the install and it still fails to find
any disks.
> 
have you considered installing with something newer than 4.0 ? thats 
almost 2 years old now, and has many known issues.

I'd recommend you install with 4.1, the DD will work fine there, you can 
then yum update the machine, move the module over, depmod, mkinitrd, 
reboot and you should be set.

If you plan on using the machine under production, I would highly 
recommend you use  >= 2.6.9-42

- KB
-- 
Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/ : 2522219 at icq

On Thu, 2006-12-21 at 14:57 -0500, Glenn MacGregor
wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I have an "appliance" cd which uses CentOS 4.0 (Final) which I am
trying to load on a new Dell 1950 server with a SAS driver controller. During
the install it fails to find any disks to load to. I got the drivers from Dell
and dd the correct one to a floppy, boot from the appliance cd and enter linux
dd at the prompt. I load the driver in the install and it still fails to find
any disks.
Maybe contact your 'applicance' provider to provide you an updated
version of his 'appliance' based on CentOS 4.x .
If you really have to stick with that appliance version, you can still
try to modify your driver disk to match the kernel used during setup
(remember that up to CentOS 4.3, a i586 kernel and not a i686 one was
used so kernel mismatch with the driver disk , containing only i686
modules !). To understand what to change : http://www.arrfab.net/?
topic=tutorials&id=centosdd

On the other hand, i had recently to setup CentOS 4.4 on newer IBM x336
servers that come with LSI Sas controller and that was supported without
any driver disk !


-- 
Fabian Arrotin <fabian.arrotin at arrfab.net>