[Centos] Promise EX16650 under 5.2?

Mon Nov 17 18:27:59 UTC 2008
Guy Boisvert <boisvert.guy at videotron.ca>

Karanbir Singh wrote:
> Gordon McLellan wrote:
>> Does anyone have experience using the Supertrak EX16650 sas controller
>> under Centos 5.2?
> 
> Do you know what the pci id's are for the device ?
> 
>> The Promise website claims RHEL 5.2 support was added Sept '08.  I
>> figure the card might very well be detected, but how about the
>> management gui - it appears to use some sort of web interface, but the
>> card has no ethernet jack, so it must rely on some special driver to
>> access this?
> 
> most of the time such webui's are run via a proxy app, that you run as 
> 'root' on the machine and then connect to over the net using your web 
> browser. its a common practice that many h/w vendors use these days.
> 


... and we have many problems with that approach which most of the time 
uses Java.

I have many servers in production (mostly Winblows boxes, i know it's 
bad but it's not my choice!) that have 2-3 of these bad admin apps and 
we have many compatibility problems.

For example, i have one server with APC UPS management, AVG Anti-Virus 
management server and Promise Management.  For Promise, i've never been 
able to make work the management interface for the PCI card at the same 
time of the external VTRak Raid chassis.  To explain a little better, i 
have a Promise "RAID" Card (it's fake raid!) and an external VTRAK 15100 
15 SATA disks to SCSI RAID Chassis.  The worst thing is that the VTRak 
has an ethernet port but still requires the crap JAVA application 
running on the server (for management, SNMP, etc)...

AVG Anti-Virus Server had Java problems after installing Promise crap 
and so on...  At least, i found APCUPSD for Win32 and finally, APC UPS 
monitoring is stable. For the rest, i can only cross my fingers...  And 
Promise don't seems to support their hardware very well: Very few 
updates since many years.

I dunno if somebody on this list has advises for these Java Apps 
problems.  Maybe it's just bad coding from these companies.  I had some 
problems on Linux too but at least, it seems that Sun has open up a bit 
support/licensing on Linux.



Regards,

Guy Boisvert, ing.
IngTegration inc.