Hello,

I have recently deployed a few Xen-based Dell-servers running NetBSD as 
Dom0 (and most of the DomU's as well) and last week I encountered a 
problem with one of the hard drives in the raidset of one of the 
servers. And when I called Dells support-line to have it replaced, I was 
asked if I could give them some information about the raidset from the 
management-software, which of course was a problem since I had none of 
their management-softwares installed on the machine.

Anyway, this problem was solved by giving them some information 
extracted via Dells BMC using ipmitools(.sourceforge.net) which they 
accepted after a while. So my question is, what options do I have when 
it comes to getting information from hardware raidsets when using 
NetBSD? The Dell-servers are equipped with PERC 4 (MegaRAID) controllers 
which attach to the amr-driver.

Below is a dmesg output from one of the controllers, that says that ld0 
is degraded, which is a good start. But it would also be nice to get 
some details about its current status etc.

amr0 at pci2 dev 14 function 0: AMI RAID <PERC 4e/Di>
amr0: interrupting at irq 38, event channel 11
amr0: firmware 521S, BIOS H430, 256MB RAM
ld0 at amr0 unit 0: RAID 5, degraded
ld0: 8192 MB, 4161 cyl, 64 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 16777216 sectors

Dell does provide some tools that can be used to boot from either a 
floopy or CD and from there extract information about the hardware. But 
taking down a system for half an hour or so in the middle of the day 
isn't always the best solution. So it would be really great if 
information about the raidset could be extracted from within NetBSD.

Any pointers or ideas would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!

Best regards,
Ola Eriksson
http://www.gmq.se
http://www.mrEriksson.net