Or an alternate title for this post could be… “LSI, the raid controller I won’t purchase again”… or “MPIO, piss off”
Anyways, in the process of adding 4 new 600GB SAS drives to an x3550 M2 server I encountered a small error. After installing the drives into the machine, creating the raid, and rebooting something was amiss.
Now my initial thought was, “what the hell is /dev/dm-0” but i moved ahead and tried fdisk anyways. At first I attempted to create a new primary partition and upon writing it out I got a wonderful error that i forgot to copy. Moral of the story, time to install 26 firmware updates.
This is usually a painful task but the IBM UpdateExpress is in fact the bees knees.
All you need is the following two commands and you are home free with all your Firmware and Driver updates.
After some on screen instructions/user input it will do most everything for you. Thank you IBM
After installing the small army of FW and Driver updates I tried again
YAY, successories. The partition has been created lets create the filesystem.
Of course looking at mount or fuser /dev/sda1 resulted in no information the drive wasn’t mounted anywhere or in use.
But after many days of working late I finally came back to that damned /dev/dm-0. Some further google fu resulted in the following two commands.
This showed that there were several mpath devices configured on the system. Since this system is not using software RAID or MPIO this is a problem it should only return
So the final fix this, tell MPIO and Multipath to get the hell out of your system by editing /etc/multipathd.conf and adding the following.
Reboot the server, the /dev/dm-0 will be gone.
And you can run mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1 and then go outside and run in a field.
May be just me, but I believe a driver for a RAID controller should maybe… just maybe check for that during the install. oh well.