| Adding more disc to a machine with lots of SATA orifaces |
So, I spent some time on the weekend adding disk to Homebrew, which is a NAS / DB server at work. This was interesting because it was coupled with an upgrade to a 2.6 Debian stock kernel. Initally I wondered what the hell those Debian people were smoking when they built an initrd that made me change from treating my IDE disks as IDE to making me treat them as SCSI. What a pain in the arse I thought to myself.
I went off half cocked to be honest. There is a reason for the change. It turns out that only older SATA controllers are supported by IDE style drivers, and that they are considered flakey (I had noticed some flake with SATA and my 2.4.23 kernel, which is why the kernel upgrade was happening in the first place). The new drivers all treat the SATA controller and disk as SCSI, which means that Debian really has to do the same.
The confusion during upgrade stemmed from not really knowing how the IDE names would map to the SCSI ones. The SCSI disks are named in detection order (I think, I haven't verified this), and the IDE ones are named for controller / chain location. As it turns out the mapping was pretty easy (hde to sda, hdg to sdb), so that wasn't too bad.
Now to work out why the upgraded box wants to boot into an interactive version of GRUB, instead of the menu...
posted at: 17:19 | path: /linux | permanent link to this entry