Areca make some SATA RAID controllers, noted for having an open source driver (arcmsr).

Red Hat Enterprise/CentOS/OpenFiler notes

A driver disk for ARC-1110/1120/1160/1170 (4/8/12/16/24-port PCI-X to SATA ll RAID Controller) for CentOS can be found at http://www.bodgit-n-scarper.com/code.html#centos.

Debian notes

Installation CDs with Areca support can be found at http://www.tienhuis.nl/areca/.

Ubuntu notes

Installed Dapper Flight 5 to an Areca RAID controller. It found the controller, installed/partitioned fine etc, but on the reboot into the new system it could not find /dev/sda1 so could not proceed with boot.

This can be fixed by booting into a recovery console, mounting the disk, adding 'arcmsr' to /etc/mkinitramfs/modules, and running dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-`uname -r`.

• Launchpad bug for this issue

Management interface

Get the Areca web interface from Areca's FTP site.

wget ftp://ftp.areca.com.tw/RaidCards/AP_Drivers/Linux/HTTP/20060321-1.71.200Beta.zip
unzip 20060321-1.71.200Beta.zip
cd 20060321-1.71.200
cp archttp32 /usr/local/sbin/

I have created this init script, with help from Gentoo's wiki page on Areca hardware:

#! /bin/sh

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
DAEMON=/usr/local/sbin/archttp32
NAME=archttp32
DESC="Areca RAID controller management interface"

test -x $DAEMON || exit 0

. /lib/lsb/init-functions

set -e

case "$1" in
  start)
        log_begin_msg "Starting $DESC..."
        start-stop-daemon --start --quiet -b -m --pidfile /var/run/$NAME.pid \
                --exec $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_OPTS 2>/dev/null || log_end_msg 1
        log_end_msg 0
        ;;
  stop)
        log_begin_msg "Stopping $DESC..."
        start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --pidfile /var/run/$NAME.pid \
            -s INT --exec $DAEMON --oknodo || log_end_msg 1
        sleep 5
        log_end_msg 0
        ;;
  restart|force-reload)
        log_begin_msg "Restarting $DESC..."
        start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --exec $DAEMON --pidfile \
                /var/run/$NAME.pid --oknodo
        sleep 6
        start-stop-daemon --start -m -b --quiet --pidfile \
                /var/run/$NAME.pid --exec $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_OPTS || log_end_msg 1
        log_end_msg 0
        ;;
  *)
        N=/etc/init.d/$NAME
        # echo "Usage: $N {start|stop|restart|force-reload}" >&2
        echo "Usage: $N {start|stop|restart|force-reload}" >&2
        exit 1
        ;;
esac

exit 0

Then, set it to run on start with:

update-rc.d archttp32 defaults

If you're on 64-bit Linux, replace all instances of 32 above with 64 (the zip file comes with both).

I have yet to find out if you can make the card send e-mail or other alerts in the case of a failure. If anyone knows, please edit this page!

(Thanks to Jason Allen for reminding me that I hadn't set this up yet.)

CategoryHardware
CategoryNotes