# aacraid-status
-- Controller informations --
-- ID | Model | Status
c0 | CERC SATA1.5/6ch | Optimal

-- Arrays informations --
-- ID | Type | Size | Status | Task | Progress
c0u0 | RAID1 | 76G | Optimal

-- Disks informations
-- ID | Model | Status
c0u0d0 | SAMSUNG HD080HJ/P | Online
c0u0d1 | WDC WD800JD-75MSA3 | Online

Do you have problems with it? Yes, you do. Microsoft makes it painful. You must make MachineKey match. You must make the IIS W3SVC ID match. You must pray it doesn’t break when you restore your metabase config. You realize some virtual directories work, while others don’t. Some servers, browsers, load balancers, work while others don’t.

Now, do yourself a favor, stop hammering your sysadmin, and get the code below. Paste into a testSession.aspx page in every machine and every virtual directory affected. You’ll get something similar to the shot below. Run it individually and through the load balancer. Check for “AppDomainAppId” mismatches (even the tinyest difference in upper/lowercase makes a difference). Check for “MachineKey” hash. Make sure everything match between servers in the farm (by hand-editing the metabase, machine.config, etc) in every virtual directory (I’ve seen uppercase/lowercase mismatches in the /LM/W2SVC/1/ROOT/VirtualDir AppDomainId string that happen on one Vdir while others are okay).

Here goes the entire code. Attention: remove this from the server after you’re done. You never know what evil people will use it for…

<%@ Page Language="C#" ValidateRequest="false" %>

Current DataTime: <%= DateTime.Now %><br/>
Current Session Mode: <b><%= Session.Mode %></b><br/>
HttpRuntime.AppDomainAppId: <b><%= HttpRuntime.AppDomainAppId %></b><br/>

<%@ Import Namespace="System.Web.Configuration" %>
<%@ Import Namespace="System.Reflection" %>

<%
MethodInfo _encOrDecData;
MethodInfo _hexStringToByteArray;
MethodInfo _byteArrayToHexString;
MethodInfo _HashAndBase64EncodeString;

MachineKeySection  config = (MachineKeySection)ConfigurationManager.GetSection("system.web/machineKey");
Type machineKeyType = config.GetType().Assembly.GetType("System.Web.Configuration.MachineKeySection");

BindingFlags bf = BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Static;

_HashAndBase64EncodeString = machineKeyType.GetMethod("HashAndBase64EncodeString", bf);

if (_HashAndBase64EncodeString == null)
{
	throw new InvalidOperationException("Unable to get the HashAndBase64EncodeString to invoke.");
}
String str = HttpRuntime.AppDomainAppId;
var HashedPiko = (String)_HashAndBase64EncodeString.Invoke(null, new object[] { str });

%>

Hashed with the MachineKey: <b><%= HashedPiko %></b><br/>

Local Machine Name: <b><%= Request.ServerVariables["LOCAL_ADDR"] %></b><br/>

Current Session ID: <b><%= Session.SessionID %></b><br/>

<%
String pikoNaSession = (String)Session["SESSION_TEST_VALUE"];
if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(pikoNaSession)) {
	Session["SESSION_TEST_VALUE"] = "Test Value, set on " + Request.ServerVariables["LOCAL_ADDR"] + " " + " at " + DateTime.Now ;
}
%>

Current value in Session: <b><%= pikoNaSession %></b><br/>

Not anymore.

First, install the latest stable TortoiseSVN.

Then install my custom build of TortoiseCVS, TortoiseCVS-1.11.6-pardini.exe. It is a custom built CVS-HEAD checkout, without many changes.

Please note that apparently TCVS is the one that decides the icons to use (both TSVN and TCVS will use the same icons), but they all work.

If it’s not working for you, uninstall all TortoiseSVN, TortoiseCVS and TortoiseOverlays you may have installed.

Also delete the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers.

Then reinstall in the order I suggested above.

Thanks to the KAME people!

So off we went to install Debian and Windows 2003 using only DRAC5′s virtual Console (kind of an IP KVM) and virtual media. No physical access to the servers is required. It all works very well, you point DRAC at an .ISO image, configure virtual media to attached in the Ctrl-E screen, hit F11 and choose to boot from “VIRTUAL CDROM”. This is where OS Installation, and problems, begin.

When installing Debian, when virtual media is attached, the PERC controller shifts stuff around so that the virtual media device can fit. That makes my RAID-5 array on the PERC be at /dev/sdc instead of the expected /dev/sda. This seems alright at first, but after the installation is done, GRUB goes insane. You can jackhammer GRUB to work, but then the megaraid_sas driver goes insane. Literally. Lockups, wierd and misleading messages. Insanity reigns.

When installing Windows without the help of the Dell Installation CD, it locks up right at the first “Windows Setup” blue screen, even before the “F6″ driver prompt. The machine literally freezes (you can still restart it using DRAC, sweet). If you try using the Dell Install CD, it goes okay until the first reboot where the same thing happens. Complete lockup.

After spending a lot of time with Dell Support with clueless people (they were about to send us a tech to swap the PERC 6i controller which was “obviously” the culprit), we finally realized the problem was the Virtual Media in DRAC5. When we disabled Virtual Media and used a real, physical, spinning DVD drive, everything was fine. It turns out Windows locked up because it couldn’t figure out the “VIRTUAL CDROM” thing. Nothing was wrong with the PERC. Debian installed like a dream too, on /dev/sda.

If you really need to use the Virtual Media, you have to go through a very boring process. First, attach virtual media in Ctrl-E screen and mount the ISO in your browser. Start installing your operating system. When it’s time for the first reboot, go into Ctrl-E again and dettach virtual media. Now the install should proceed as normal…

All in all, DRAC5 is a very useful thing, it’s KVM capabilities have already paid for themselves if only in gasoline saved in trips to the datacenter. Now a Firefox 3 plugin, and fixes to the Virtual Media problems, would be very nice. Hello Dell?

1) Prepare the RAID setup for initial install. Dell does not support Debian, so you need a way to configure your RAID volumes beforehand (at the very least, the volume where you will install Debian, but I just go ahead and configure all my volumes). For this purpose I’ve found the excellent “CentOS Dell OMSA 5.1 Live CD”. Just burn the ISO, boot from it, set the root password, wait a lot, and you can get into the Web Interface for OMSA where you can set up the storage. I’ve set “Adaptive Read Ahead”, “Write back” and other performance-enabling RAID options.

2) Install Debian Etch (x86). I used a 3-in-1 CD, which has a i486, amd64 and power installer, and with that it was a little tricky to force i386/i486 instead of amd64 (it seems to auto-detect). The Dell PERC controller and NICs were all detected, even though it seems the (Gigabit) Ethernet ports were reversed (port 1 was eth1 and port 2 was eth0 – I’ve seen this reported before). Proceeded with standard install, I went with straight ext3 filesystems. You may want LVM or other fancy stuff, but I didn’t bother. I took care of unchecking the “Standard system” install option, which would install a lot of uneeded stuff like NFS, and results in a very, very minimal Debian install. Complete install, set root password, apt sources etc, and boot into the new system.

3) New kernel and packages. “aptitude update” and install SSH and the new kernel “aptitude install ssh linux-image-2.6-686-bigmem”. This should be all handled automatically, including the new kernel being setup in grub. Reboot. Once the system is back up, check /proc/cpuinfo, /proc/meminfo and “top” for correct 8-logical-CPU and 16635720 kB MemTotal. You may want to do a “aptitude upgrade” too to update everything with security updates. I also like ntpdate, tz-brasil and ntp-server for keeping the clock right.

4) Install Dell OMSA. The nice folks at sara.nl offer some excellent pre-packaged Dell OMSA install for Debian (it’s version 5.2, so it just plain works, without the “storage not found” problem). Thanks to them, you can just add “deb http://ftp.sara.nl/pub/sara-omsa dell sara” to /etc/apt/sources.list (ftp:// also works), do “aptitude update”, and “aptitude install dellomsa” and it’s quite ready. It’s a large package, around 100mb, but installs perfectly. After the install, run “update-rc.d dsm_om_connsvc defaults” and “/etc/init.d/dsm_om_connsvc start”. You can then go to “https://x.y.z.w:1311″ (on another machine) and get to the OMSA web interface. Log-in as “root” with root’s shell password. It’s just that sweet. Dell’s own install system on supported OSes are not even close. I will post about SNMP support for OMSA later.

5) Install VMWare prerequisites. VMWare Server links dynamically to a lot of stuff. I got a few pointers from other sites, but ultimately “ldd” and “apt-cache search” were my best friends. The best indication you’re missing libraries is the VMWare install program complaining about them, or even rejecting your VMWare serial number, or vmware-mui telling you vmware isn’t installed. Anyway, this is the final aptitude line for install all the dependencies I found: “aptitude install libx11-6 libx11-dev libxtst6 xinetd wget linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential gcc g++ psmisc libxt6 libxrender1 libxi6″.

6) Install VMWare Server and VMWare Management Interface. You get these from vmware.com after registering. Don’t forget to request your free serial number from them too. You should download the latest version (I got 1.0.3) in .tar.gz format. Just “tar xzvf” them, and run the installer script as per the manual. Everything should go smooth – VMWare will say you’ll need to compile the modules, and that should go just fine (no need for any-to-any patches). Do the same install routine for vmware-mui. Once it’s installed you can get to the nice VMWare web interface via “https://x.y.z.w:8333″. You will also connect via VMWare Console (I run that on Windows…) on x.y.z.w port 902. VMWare is able to see around 14.5Gb of RAM, which is excellent for my needs. Any given VM is limited to 3600mb, as usual.