[tech] New-Undead-Maltair

[Andrew Adamson]

Hi All,

Maltair is back up and running again on an HP DL380 Gen 8 which the club 
bought at auction. 

Specs are:
Dual E5-2690 @ 2.90GHz
196GB RAM
Dual PSU
disks from old maltair...two 120GB SSD's mirrored as system disks, plus a 
500G ceph disk

We got bitten by the onboard HP P420i raid controller, which supports 
JBOD/HBA mode after some hacking (that's Just a Boring Old Disk 
passthrough for those who don't know), but doesn't let you boot from a 
non-raided disk. Eugh, how enterprisey.

The solution was to grab the MegaRAID SAS 2008 card out of the old IBM 
x3550 new-dead-maltair and put it in to new-undead-maltair. The card is 
motherboard mounted in the IBM, but still uses a standard PCIe slot - I 
happened to find a PCI mounting bracket that fit it on the machine room 
shelf, so it all sits nicely in the HP case. One notable problem I had is 
that the SAS backplane cables in the HP could not reach the new card 
location, so I had to steal a cable out of old maltair. New-undead-maltair 
needs two - new-dead-maltair only had one that was long enough, so only 
disks 1-4 (the left bays) are actually connected to anything. The RIGHT 
FOUR BAYS ARE CURRENTLY DISCONNECTED. Perhaps someone with a little time 
could get another long cable out of the other dead x3550 and install it.

The machine booted straight away with the new SAS card, but network didn't 
work because the interface names were different. Back in my day I would 
have edited /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules to assign an 
interface name (like eth0) to a particular port...this doesn't seem to be 
the case anymore, I tried it and basically nothing happened *shakes fist 
at systemd*. Anyway, eno1 and eno2 seem to be the new hotness and I'm 
disinclined to fight that, so I just updated /etc/network/interfaces with 
the new name and off it went.

Andrew Adamson
bob at ucc.asn.au

|"If you can't beat them, join them, and then beat them."                |
| ---Peter's Laws                                                        |