SLES 8 on Dell PE 1750 Notes

Intro

This doc describes some problems and solutions with installing SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 on a Dell PowerEdge 1750.

The Problem

The PowerEdge 1750 hardware bites!

Well, that isn't exactly the problem... I will say, however, that I am less than enthusiastic about the RAID and ethernet controllers on the 1750. My prior Dell PowerEdge experience has been with the model 1650, which has Intel ethernet controllers and an Adaptec RAID controller. The 1750, on the other hand, is using Broadcom for its gigabit ethernet and an LSI MegaRAID controller. And here within lies our problem:

According to Matt Domsch's Linux page, the PERC 4/Di version of the LSI controller requires the megaraid 1.18f driver or higher, with 1.18i or higher recomended. The SLES 8 installation seemingly doesn't meet these requirements, as the automated installation process is unable to detect the RAID and manually attempting to load the megaraid driver fails.

The Solution

Spend money!

One advantage of work having shelled out for SLES is that you get access to SuSE's handy dandy support and patch download site. Unfortunately, nowhere there do they say "Download this to make the install on a PE 1750 go."

What they do have are these really nice ISOs for United Linux 1.0 service packs. In particular, I downloaded the Service Pack 3 ISOs. There are two total, but I only needed the first one for my application.

The first CD is bootable and goes into the standard bootloader that you see when you install any recent SuSE product, only this time it says "United Linux" at the top. Boot into the Manual Installation mode and you will now be able to successfully load the new megaraid driver for the SCSI RAID. Back up and select Start Installation, with DVD/CD as the media. Before you actually let it rip, be sure to pop out the SP3 CD and insert your SLES installation CD. The installer should run as you would normally expect it to, now recognizing your RAID container(s). Do what you have to do and restart.

The only problem now is that your freshly installed system still doesn't have the right drivers on it... it has the original inadequate ones. So pop the SP3 CD back in, manually load the megaraid driver, and then go back and tell it to boot the installed system. Presto! It works... now you just need to update those drivers. I ended up running the whole SP3 update to handle this and whatever else had come down the pike between the release and SP3.

Do to a combination of less-than-clear docs from SuSE, and my XF86 config being a bit busted, I opted to do the command line install of the service pack by mounting the CD on /media/cdrom and then running sh /mount/cdrom/install.sh . [As a side note, my bootloader didn't seem to install right originally... perhaps do to a system or human error, which I can't say, but I went into yast2 and fixed it either way.] You can now pop out the SP CD and reboot the system and all should be well.

Or, at least it was in my experience.


techno-obscura : delgado : notes