Thread: Areca Radi cards - Centos

We've just taken delivery of a number of new Dell R200's and We're evaluating which raid cards to go for.

Our first test has been with a Areca 1200 2port Sata II card. The problem is that the drivers don't seem to be included in our choice of OS, Centos 5.1. We have done the driver disk 'stuff' and can get a working solution up until we do a Yum update and the kernel changes! and bang no raid card drivers

So the point of this post - are we missing something, is this just a problem because the 1200 is such a new card? If we rent a server to a client one would expect them to do a yum update? Do the 3ware cards suffer the same?

Any advice/experience appreciated

Thanks in advance

Richard

SAS6iR - We considered it, and we may ultimately go that way, but I suspected (May be incorrectly) that this wasn't really hardware raid.

Richard

They're £ 73+VAT @ 6iR list price and they've been including them FOC while they have been shifting what one would assume are some of the last 80GB SATA stocks (2 x 80GB).

Originally Posted by Cyberprog

Yes, that's what I mean, they're £73 on the dell website when you buy with the machine IIRC, they tend to be a bit more expensive seperatley

1 SAS 6iR internal RAID controller, PCI-e (Kit) £ 57.54
1 Intel PRO 1000VT Quad Port Gigabit Network Card, PCI-E (Kit) £ 223.74
1 INTEL PRO1000PT Dual Port CU NIC, PCI-E (Kit) £ 68.72

That's the price I got 3rd of this month for buying individually.

Hi,

RHEL5 Update 1 (aka CentOS 5.1) has explicit support for Areca RAID cards.

Source: http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/e...U1-x86-en.html

(tip: search for 'arcmsr' in the above document)

Is it simply a case that the 'arcmsr' driver included with CentOS 5.1 is not new enough for this particular card ?

This is from one of my CentOS 5.1 boxes (running latest available CentOS kernel):

[admin@ifl2-gw1 ~]$ rpm -ql kernel | grep arcmsr
/lib/modules/2.6.18-53.1.14.el5/kernel/drivers/scsi/arcmsr
/lib/modules/2.6.18-53.1.14.el5/kernel/drivers/scsi/arcmsr/arcmsr.ko

I wonder if the Areca-supplied drivers use the 'arcmsr' driver name or some other name - check your modprobe.conf file and change it to arcmsr if all else fails.

Regards,
Terry Froy
Spilsby Internet Solutions
http://www.spilsby.net/

Thanks for the info.... just a small thing, I was asking about anyones experience with areca cards.. not getting grumpy

(And yes I do have my Dell account manager quoting for cards - can anyone connfirm they have centos 5.1 support out of the box/dvd/cd)

Thanks

Originally Posted by Cyberprog

Hrm, I stand corrected then, that's not bad at all.

I was a bit surprised too, it's not the usual 'Dell way'.

Out-of-date driver ?

Is it simply a case that the 'arcmsr' driver included with CentOS 5.1 is not new enough for this particular card ?

This is from one of my CentOS 5.1 boxes (running latest available CentOS kernel):

[admin@ifl2-gw1 ~]$ rpm -ql kernel | grep arcmsr
/lib/modules/2.6.18-53.1.14.el5/kernel/drivers/scsi/arcmsr
/lib/modules/2.6.18-53.1.14.el5/kernel/drivers/scsi/arcmsr/arcmsr.ko

I wonder if the Areca-supplied drivers use the 'arcmsr' driver name or some other name - check your modprobe.conf file and change it to arcmsr if all else fails.

Hi Terry,

I think your right the card is almost as new as 5.1. As a clue when you do the OS install you have to load the driver seperately. I've done the 'readme.txt' install post the OS install and all is ok, its just when the kernel gets upgraded to 53.1.14 as above (via Yum) that the system then won't boot as no raid disc is found. Its a shame because it seems like a great card for not much more money than a sas6ir. I'll email areca tomorrow and see what they say. I have 8 machines as a first batch that I'm building identical so I want to get it right

Thanks