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List:       evms-devel
Subject:    Re: [Evms-devel] SuSE 10.1 w/ EVMS 2.5.5 & 10TB RAID5 + 160GB RAID0
From:       Mike Tran <mhtran () us ! ibm ! com>
Date:       2006-08-31 21:24:09
Message-ID: 44F75379.3000405 () us ! ibm ! com
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Hi Randy,

Randall Sprague wrote:
> Dear EVMS Development List Team,
>
> Here at Westmont College, we're trying to build an Open Source iSCSI 
> SAN server for a lot less money than the big
> boys want to charge for their mediocre offerings.  I'm in a time 
> critical project that's running out of time - and I'm responsible.  
> I need some EVMS configuration help -- while I'm not a newbie, I have 
> indeed run aground and need some help.
>
> Essentially, we have a new 5U Intel S5000VSA motherboard-based server 
> with dual Xeon dual-core 64-bit CPUs, 8GB DRAM and 12TB of SATA 
> storage, that we're trying to convert into an iSCSI SAN server 
> via SuSE 10.1 64-bit w/ EVMS.  We have two 160GB drives in a RAID0 
> mirror that host the 10.1 SuSE OS, and the remaining 16 750GB SATA 
> drives are connected to two 3Ware 12ML 9550SX RAID controllers.  The 
> 750GB SATA disks are in two different RAID5 arrays (array0 and array1, 
> respectively) -- one is appx. 6TB and the other is appx 3.9TB 
> formatted capacity.
>
> We installed EVMS properly, patched the kernel and of course ran make 
> menuconfig with the proper options enabled and module
> selections -vs.- compiled-in selections, then compiled kernel sources, 
> built the modules, built a new image and moved it into /boot.  We also 
> followed your suggestions for making an initrd image of EVMS, and 
> placed that in the same directory.  That all went relatively smoothly 
> until we attempted to boot with grub.
I hope that you did not overwrite the existing vmlinuz and initrd images.
>
> Our thoughts initially, were to keep the OS separate from EVMS, so the 
> exclude=[...] statement inside of our evms.conf file contains excludes 
> of our "/", "/root","/boot","/usr","/bin", etc., within the section it 
> belongs in for the 2.6 kernels, to exclude the volumes of our root 
> file systems.  Unfortunately though, it seems to be having the 
> opposite effect, and I haven't figured out how to resolve that and
> how to correct it.

I think SuSE 10.1 comes with 2.6.16 kernel.  Therefore, you only need to 
patch the kernel if you need:
- EVMS BBR feature and/or
- BD-CLAIM patch.

Please note if you don't want EVMS to manage the existing mounted 
volumes (as you stated above), you don't need bd-claim patch. For more 
details, please read: http://evms.sourceforge.net/install/kernel.html

You're correct with the changes you made to evms.conf that is to exclude 
the disks which the existing mounted volumes are based on.
>
> SuSE 10.1 panic's with the following error, in a constant loop: 
> (..below are the last 3 lines above
> the panic statement before the server shuts down)
>
> *MD: Autodetecting RAID arrays*
> *MD: ....autorun DONE.*
> *VFS:  cannot open root device "<NULL>" or unknown_block(8,1)*
> *Please append a correct "root=" boot option*
> *kernel panic*
> The grub configuration is also hosed now, even though I manually edit 
> it each time I boot to place the statement
> inline that says "kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.16.13.4.smp initrd 
> root=/dev/sda1", followed by "boot" on the next line, 
> which decompresses the kernel and boots it, until it reaches the 5 
> lines shown above and panics again.  It's
> behaving as though EVMS is grabbing my root file system and making it 
> invisible to the OS -- or at least SuSE
> now thinks it is (?)  Am I misinterpreting this, or would someone be 
> able to help me work through this problem?

Did you overwrite the original SuSE 10.1 boot image and initrd?  If not, 
you should be able to boot because evms binaries are not in the original 
initrd.

The section system startup should have additional information 
http://evms.sourceforge.net/faq.html

-- Mike T.


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