Installed PERC management software afaapps and created simple mirror

Posted on August 18, 2009

Installed PERC management software afaapps and created simple mirror

I just installed Debian Lenny on a Dell 2650 with an OLD PERC 3 RAID controller.

I then installed the afaapps package from Dell’s website (http://support.us.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&releaseid=R85529&formatcnt=1&libid=0&fileid=112003)
Use this link or just search for ‘afaapps’ under the Drivers and Downloads section of the Dell support site.

After extracting the rpm from the downloaded file I ran alien against the file to turn it into a debian file

#apt-get install alien
#alien -d –scripts afaapps-2.8-0.i386.rpm

Now just install theÂ created debian package

#dpkg -i afaapps_2.8-1_i386.deb

Now that you have installed the afacli you can run it at the command line prompt which will open theÂ PERC command line “FASTCMD>”
Then you’ll open / connect to the RAID controller using “open afa0”

#afacli
FASTCMD> open afa0
Executing: open “afa0”

A simple ‘disk list’ command to find out what your disk situation looks like

AFA0> disk list
Executing: disk list

B:ID:L Device Type Blocks Bytes/Block Usage Shared
—— ————– ——— ———– —————- ——
0:00:0 Disk 35566478Â 512 Initialized NO
0:01:0 Disk 287132440 512 Initialized NO
0:02:0 Disk 287132440 512 Initialized NO

you may have to initialize your disks by typeing ‘disk initialize 1’ and ‘disk initialize 2’ to make sure that the container can access them,Â you can see in my example above that my two disks are already initialized.

Now I will create a volume on disk 1 and mirror that disk to disk 2

AFA0> container create volume 1
AFA0> container create mirror 1 2

At the bottom of your screen you should see the status of the mirroring Job, something like.

Stat:OK!, Task:100, Func:MSC Ctr:1, State:RUN 16.2%

Once the job completes you can partition and format the disk. Check the label on the disk by running:

AFA0> container list
Executing: container list
Num Total Oth Chunk Scsi Partition
Label Type Size Ctr Size Usage B:ID:L Offset:Size
—– —— —— — —— ——- —— ————-
0 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

1 Mirror 136GB Valid 0:01:0 64.0KB: 136GB
/dev/sdb 0:04:0 64.0KB: 136GB

From this I can see that I will need to partition and format disk “/dev/sdb”

Have fun! And if I can help you on it let me know.