Hot swap disks+CentOS+Interworx.

Hi chaps,

We’re about to buy a Dell Poweredge 1950 with hot swap disks in a raid 1 configuration (might even think about other raid combinations).
We will be installing Centos 5 (never tried it - normally use Centos 4) + Interworx.

The question is: what happens when a disk fails? How do we find out?(Apart from looking at the server) Any software notices?
Once noticed, what is the standard procedure to replace the disk? (Remember they are “hot swap”) I suppose there won’t be any problems with Interworx, will there?

Thanks all and sorry about posting here, but in the description of this forum it said: “If you don’t know where to post…”

Thanks,

Dan

I would actually love to know the answer to this question as well…

Maybe it’s a dan thing :slight_smile: lol

You have a few options

There’s a command line utility that you can run that will print out the status of the array. You can setup a cron job to just run the command and look for a “bad” status or I’m sure there’s an SNMP trap you can set to have the box notify you.

I have more experience with 1850s than 1950s but they are most likely pretty close. On 1850s you can get the “megarc” linux package (if you’re running linux on the box) and it includes the command line utility for the 1850 raid card. Check for something similar for 1950s.

Regarding how to “fix”, you simply remove the bad drive and put in the new one if you have it configured with RAID 1. InterWorx, the OS, and anything else running won’t notice a difference.

Chris

Hi,

Thanks for the reply, I’d forgotten this thread was here.

About changing disks, it’s fine if you just pull the disk and replace it with another one (I’ve tried it and it works perfectly!).

I’ll double check for the package you said and see if it works with the 1950 (another one is on it’s way).

Thanks Chris!

We run the following each night to check the status of the raid:

# grep out the status, should state "Ok"
STATUS=`/opt/dell/srvadmin/oma/bin/omreport.sh storage vdisk | grep Status | cut -d " " -f 16`
if [ "$STATUS" = "Ok" ]; then
        echo "Raid is OK!" > /dev/null 2>&1
        else mail -s "Raid is NOT Ok on <hostname>!" user@domain.tld < /dev/null
fi

-tsl-