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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`.

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/

If you just want to fire up the web interface right away, go ahead and run it - but remember to run it w/ root privileges (ie: 'sudo archttp32/64'). Areca will not remind you about the root privileges and will silently fail to find the controllers.

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).

You can drop an archttpsrv.conf in the same directory, which is how you configure SMTP notifications.

You connect to http://server:81/; the default username is 'admin', password is '0000'

CategoryHardware
CategoryNotes