Installing Intel’s RAID Web Console 2

Finally got an install of Intel’s RAID Web Console 2 I’m happy with.

My server configuration is an Intel S5000PSL mother board with six SATA drives. Five are in a single RAID 5 logical array, with the sixth configured as a hot spare. All of this was configured through the BIOS RAID utility.

Operating System on the server is the CentOS 4 x86 64 distribution of Linux with megasr driver (version 06.28.11.0.2006). I wanted to avoid installing a graphic user interface on the server. The server will be a VMware host for testing virtual machines, so I would like to keep the packages installed at this level to a minimum.

This meant I needed a way to monitor and configure the RAID system without halting the OS and jumping down to the BIOS. My plan was to use Intel’s RAID Web Console 2 application client on a Windows PC talking to the server software running on CentOS.

Both the Intel Deployment Assistant CD version 1.0.1 (June 2006) that was delivered with the motherboard, and the version 1.2 (November 2006) that I downloaded from the Intel site contained RAID Web Console 1.13. Installing and running this version in client/server mode only gave a Java popup window after 15 seconds or so with the message “No Servers Found”.

I found a more recent version of RAID Web Console 2 for linux on the Intel site (1.19), but struggled to find a similar version for Windows through the Intel site search. Finally, a google search (“RWC2 1.19 site:intel.com”) turned up a ReadMe file for the Windows version that let me guess the URL for the Windows download.

The linux server side installed two services in /etc/init.d—mrmonitor and vivaldiframeworkd. I’m not convinced that vivaldiframeworkd started up on its own. It may also be that it died shortly after the installation, but I had to do a sudo /sbin/service vivaldiframeworkd restart before getting a successful test. I should do a reboot on the server to make sure that both of these scripts start up correctly. I also disabled the firewall on the server (using system-config-security) and did lots of netstat -ltpn and scrolling through /tmp/vivaldi_startup.txt before I saw that the service was running on port 49258. With all of the installs and uninstalls of different versions of RWC2 on both client and server, I’m not certain what may have interfered with the server coming up cleanly.

Once both client and server were at version 1.19, the program came up successfully under Windows (though the java app doesn’t seem to show up on the taskbar until you have alt-tabbed it into focus). I did a quick backup of the server, then set disk 4 of my array off-line.

Success! Though the virtual disk showed up as “degraded” in the RWC2 application, my ssh session from Windows to server was unaffected. My hot spare disk came into play and the array started rebuilding. The lights on the server flashed frantically for the next hour and fifteen minutes, before the Virtual Disk state returned to “optimal”.

I marked disk 4 as a hot spare, then held my breath and physically removed disk 5 from the the disk bay. A rebuild started on disk 4 (again indicated by the RWC2 application and flashing lights). I marched the still-beating disk 5 around the house, showing it to a suitably unimpressed family (though Luke made an effort so I wouldn’t feel bad). RWC2 also removed the disk icon from the port 5 icon. I returned disk 5 to its bay, it showed as “unconfigured & good”, I right-clicked on it and again set it to “hot spare”.

Still to do: See if I can integrate the RAID monitoring service into LogWatch, Big Brother, or some other alert system.