[CentOS] Install Centos 6 x86_64 on Dell PowerEdge 2970 and aSSD (hardware probing issues)

Sat Sep 6 23:02:18 UTC 2014
Valeri Galtsev <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu>

On Sat, September 6, 2014 4:52 pm, John R Pierce wrote:
> On 9/6/2014 1:53 PM, Valeri Galtsev wrote:
>> ... I've mentioned manufacturers in another reply: tyan, lsi, 3ware,
>> ati...
>
> A few months ago, I had to flash the firmware on a LSI 2008 aka 9211-8i
> because I needed the card in "IT" (Initiator Target) mode rather than
> "IR" (Integrated Raid), and this requires different firmware AND card
> bios.    This was surprisingly difficult to accomplish as the system had
> a UEFI BIOS, and on that the LSI logic firmware flasher wouldn't operate
> in MSDOS, I had to discover and utilize this bizarro-world known as the
> UEFI Shell to run the firmware flash utility.
>

That doesn't mean that you have to flash firmware onto LSI controller
every so often after you placed controller into production because
original version of firmware is crap, and updated version will turn out to
be crap several Months after its release, and so on. You did have nice
thing before you flashed, which alas was different hardware from what you
needed. You flashed different version to modify hardware. And after that
the hardware was exactly what you needed it to be. And from this point on
you don't need to flash it, unless you decide to change its functions to
what they were with original firmware.

This whole thing is way different from what I originally was displeased
(i.e. the "necessity" to apply updates to firmware to fix the thing that
appears to be broken with older crappy version of firmware).

So: LSI still is in my list of great hardware manufacturers. (Even though
my favorite is 3ware, I forgot to mention one other good one: areca, whose
place will be after lsi in my book). And I don't care how hard it is to
flash LSI card (which you had to do _before_ you placed it into
production). In worst case scenario you could hire someone to do it for
you. After doing it yourself you can become extremely proud of yourself:
now you know that you are worth of your salary. But certainly you knew it
before that ;-)

Valeri

>
>
> --
> john r pierce                                      37N 122W
> somewhere on the middle of the left coast
>
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++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
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