Hivelocity has been quite a good host for us for a coupla years now - but today a friend of mine, who owned a 500$ Hivelocity RAID 1+0 server permanently lost his data completely, I had to really try and figure out what happened.

I suddenly figured that I had no scripts to really monitor my hardware raid. After a lot of googling, I came upon a couple of tidbits, that could help others.

Figuring out what controller you have

I took a lot of help from this script here to figure out which RAID card I have. In general it could be

1. 3Ware SATA RAID -  lsmod|grep 3w-xxxx or lsmod|grep 3w_xxxx
2. LSI Megaraid - lsmod|grep -w megaraid
3. LSI Megaraid SAS - lsmod | grep megaraid_sas

Since, I have a LSI Megaraid card on my server, I will be writing about Megaraid … and its tools - Megacli

Installing MegaCli

(This step took me a while to locate) Add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://hwraid.le-vert.net/ubuntu lucid main

run sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install megacli

MegaCli is now installed. The command I use to get the fastest piece of info is

sudo megacli -AdpAllInfo -aAll -NoLog | grep -A 6 “Virtual Drives”

You get the following pieces of information

Virtual Drives : 1 Degraded : 0 Offline : 0 Physical Devices : 3 Disks : 2 Critical Disks : 0 Failed Disks : 0

Thats good enough for a quick monitor - add that into your crontab and you’re good to go. A good readymade script is here.

RAID battery issues

As I read in this blog post, there are issues with LSI Megaraid controllers (usually in Dell servers), where the RAID battery state is using its heuristics to learn about RAID behavior .. especially after a reboot.

Generate an event-log-since-last-reboot using megacli -AdpEventLog -GetSinceReboot -f events.log -aALL

Grep for the keyword changing. The reason why this flags is an issue because RAID controllers try to autolearn the battery charge. Double check your autolearn mode by megacli -AdpBbuCmd -GetBbuStatus -a0

# echo “autoLearnMode=1” > tmp.txt # megacli -AdpBbuCmd -SetBbuProperties -f tmp.txt -a0

Please run the autolearn cycle manually by megacli -AdpBbuCmd -BbuLearn -a0