Topic: SME5 & sw RAID 1 strange behavior

[Mahmood Al-Yousif]

I noticed that if you use dial-up and RAID1 on a new SME5(0/.02/3), the dial-up is completely unusable. Anyone else with this problem, or does 5.1 address this issue?

The config is P3/1G/128/2x40 Seagate EIDE/56k.

Is it because the disks are attempting to sync on a fresh install that you have to wait until the sync is done then diald is usable?

I can ping some sites (yahoo) but all others (including e-smith/microsoft) I get no response. Of course I cannot get any client to connect to the internet or surf any site.

Once I disconnect the second hdd, it works fine. To make sure, I reformatted using only one drive and it works fine.

I do get "resync" on startup and /md1 still mounted failed error on shutdown, but no adverse effects are noticed due to these errors, I guess superfluous...

I had to re-install 4.1.2 with updates to get it to work, I would rather use 5. So any help any of you could point out would be appreciated.

regards
mahmood

[Lloyd Keen]

You've hit the nail on the head there. While the drives are syncing they chew up mega processor usage and the serial ports basically don't get a look in. It could take up to 8 hours for the drives to sync so unplug the modem and grab a couple of cups of coffee and relaaaxxxxx. Come back the next day and all will be fine.

[Mahmood Al-Yousif]

Ah, thought so! Thanx for the confirmation....

Would a hardware raid solution be faster?

regards
mahmood

[Tony Olesen]

Quite... And as a bonus, it would not put the heavy load on the linux processor.

[Mahmood Al-Yousif]

Thanx for that Tony. As I expected.

I've seen several posts on the preferred raid controller, and (correct me if I'm wrong) the adaptec 2100 still has problems.... so I'll check the manual to see what e-smith suggests and get one of those.

Any preferred ones?

regards
Mahmood

[Charlie Brady]

Mahmood Al-Yousif wrote:

> Is it because the disks are attempting to sync on a fresh
> install that you have to wait until the sync is done then
> diald is usable?
>
> I can ping some sites (yahoo) but all others (including
> e-smith/microsoft) I get no response. Of course I cannot get
> any client to connect to the internet or surf any site.

The standard IDE driver disables interrupts during disk accesses, and that can cause dropped bits on the serial link used for your modem dialup.

If it's a fresh install and you have no data to lose, you can turn on some enhanced features of the IDE driver. I think that'll help. Do:

/sbin/e-smith/db configuration setprop hdparm status enabled
/sbin/e-smith/signal-event reboot

Those enhanced features of the IDE driver are disabled by default, because some people had problems, even with new hardware.

Regards

Charlie

[Mahmood Al-Yousif]

Thanx Charlie, I'll try that and see if it improves matters.

regards
Mahmood