Improving support for Debian based OS’s
Posted in General by Phil WilsonHi folks, I have had a number of questions both from the blog and also directly from customers regarding better support for Debian based OS’s.
Thanks to Vincent for his recent comment ..
Vincent wrote :-
“I’d really like to see some official support for Debian based systems. All the supported systems have a common root. I’d imagine that at least supporting Ubuntu LTS might be something desirable, since that is aimed at being stable and offering long term support.”
I forwarded this to our management team and they are asking what we need to do to provide better support. I would appreciate any comments that you may have - to start the ball rolling here are some of my own thoughts.
- Provide DEB packaged versions of ASM with scripts that work on Debian based distributions (to avoid having to convert the rpm and manually edit and setup the init scripts) - see http://linux.adaptec.com/2007/11/15/how-do-i-get-adaptec-storage-manager-to-work-with-ubuntu-710/
- Provide support for users other than root to have admin privilege within ASM since the root account is often disabled or password less - an issue raised by Thomas. On this subject, although not yet publically available, the next version of ASM provides “administrator” equivalent privilege in the GUI for user account aac if a member of the wheel group as an alternative to using the root account.
- Perhaps, as Vincent suggests, adding Ubuntu LTS to our validation and test matrix and potentially include a driver deb package for folk who wish to use the latest if this would be useful.
Please add your comments. I will be away for a week but would like to present them to the management team mid August.
thanks, Phil
July 24th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Having a .deb from the official debian repositories would be a major leap towards increased support. I have no idea if Adaptec employs a debian developer who could do this?
So far, I have converted .rpm to .deb myself
http://sunoano.name/ws/public_xhtml/hardware.html#adaptec_31205_raid_hba
July 25th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Dear Phil,
this would be great, I have five Ubuntu servers (8.10 & 9.04) with Adaptec 3805 and I would love to be able to monitor disks and get an e-mail if a disk fails.
Cheers,
Walter
August 4th, 2009 at 2:11 am
Just adding my support for this action. Debs always make upgrading to the new version much easier. My current setup requires me to enter my root password twice just to view my controller status (as well has having to set a root password, something I didn’t want to do). I would love to just be able to add my user to a group.
August 4th, 2009 at 11:36 am
Great ideas and I think since the rpms work on Lenny almost out of the box some repository hosted by adaptec with the packages would be the best solution. Creating custom debian packages is an easy job, just like hosting your own repository.
Btw: debs are much easyer to handle than rpms so I never understood why companies offered rpms but no debs.
August 14th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
Yes, please.
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Cheers to Jörg Herzinger … great comment !!!
September 18th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
this would be awesome. i would suggest testing with some form of Debian itself as the other distros are built off of it. but however you guys decide to do the testing, getting a .deb out there of any sort would be great. im currently running my controllers with no OS tools installed as i have not had the time or energy to convert the .rpm and change the scripts around, not to mention setting up the accounts to work with it afterwords.
November 12th, 2009 at 12:30 am
This would be fantastic. My company is developing a product based on the Ubuntu LTS distribution, and it would be really nice to have more vendor support for hardware RAID. We’re currently limited to controllers from a certain vendor with a number and four letters in the name, due to their excellent distribution-independent utility.
I would personally be happy if Adaptec would ship a statically-linked executable and man page in a tar.gz file.
November 18th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Hi Alex, sorry for the delay - we do have the arcconf CLI utility though it ships together with the ASM software and hasn’t been publically posted separately. It works on pretty much everything (though uses an older libstdc++ library so the ASM package includes this to avoid compatibility problems). I can mail you a tarball with the x86 and x86_64 versions of the utility and the older libstdc++ lib if that would be any help? I like the idea you propose - will see if I can put that together.
For info regarding the ASM software, I did add this to another post but really should have added it here too. There’s a deb packaged (and scripts fixed) version of the latest public shipping ASM s/w here
http://www.adaptec.com/support/files/
When prompted enter :-
Filename: asm_debian_x86_x64_v6_30_18508.tgz
Password: ASMDEB
This is a tar of both the 32bit and amd64 versions of the ASM software. It is a repackage of the latest 6.30 build 18508 version released on the public site (but made by me so any problems please report them back here).
many thanks, Phil