[CentOS] Centos 4.0 (Final) and Dell 1950 with SAS controller

Thu Dec 21 19:57:09 UTC 2006
Glenn MacGregor <gtm at highstreetnetworks.com>

Hi All,

I have an "appliance" cd which uses CentOS 4.0 (Final) which I am trying to load on a new Dell 1950 server with a SAS driver controller. During the install it fails to find any disks to load to. I got the drivers from Dell and dd the correct one to a floppy, boot from the appliance cd and enter linux dd at the prompt. I load the driver in the install and it still fails to find any disks.

I have looked at the virtual consoles after the module disk and I see some strange information:

failed to open /tmp/drivers/modules.pcimap: no such file or directory
failed to open /tmp/drviers/pci.ids: no such file or directory
.....
modules to insert mptbase mptscsih mptsas
module(s) mptbase mptscsih mptsas not found


So the driver disk is loading but....it can't find the modules. So I went on looking at the driver disk and found:

-rw-r--r--  1 root root     48 Dec 20  2005 disk-info
drwx------  2 root root  12288 Dec 20  2005 lost+found
-rw-r--r--  1 root root    330 Dec 20  2005 modinfo
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 817645 Dec 20  2005 modules.cgz
-rw-r--r--  1 root root    116 Dec 20  2005 modules.dep
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  52852 Dec 20  2005 packages.py
-rw-r--r--  1 root root    993 Dec 20  2005 pcitable
-rw-r--r--  1 root root     32 Dec 20  2005 rhdd

So I figured out that modules.cgz is zip and cpio'd, I undid it and this is what is in that archive:

drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 4096 Dec 21 14:22 2.6.9-11.EL
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 4096 Dec 21 14:22 2.6.9-11.ELhugemem
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 4096 Dec 21 14:22 2.6.9-11.ELsmp
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 4096 Dec 21 14:22 2.6.9-22.EL
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 4096 Dec 21 14:22 2.6.9-22.ELhugemem
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 4096 Dec 21 14:22 2.6.9-22.ELsmp
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 4096 Dec 21 14:22 2.6.9-5.EL
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 4096 Dec 21 14:22 2.6.9-5.ELhugemem
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 4096 Dec 21 14:22 2.6.9-5.ELsmp
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 3850 Dec 20  2005 fusion.mptctl


This seemed strange to me because CentOS 4.0 uses kernel 2.6.9-5.0.3.EL. So my question is could that be why the modules can not be found? If so what changes do I need to make to this driver disk to get working on CentOS 4.0?

The controller is LSISAS1068

Sorry for the long post and thanks for the help.

 Glenn

--
Glenn MacGregor
HighStreet Networks