I don’t want to dwell on how many hours I just wasted trying to get the status of an embedded RAID controller on an Intel S3420GP board running openSUSE 11.3. The solution is to avoid the dizzying array of software that Intel offers on their website, and instead use dmraid.
My understanding of this is a little shaky, but first you need to know where the controller is mapped. After some poking around the system, I came across this:
# ls -1 /dev/mapper control ddf1_MegaSR___R1__0 ddf1_MegaSR___R1__0_part1 ddf1_MegaSR___R1__0_part2 ddf1_MegaSR___R1__0_part3
I know my array has three partitions so it seemed intuitive that the device was named ddf1_MegaSR___R1__0. I was then able to get the status with:
# dmraid -s ddf1_MegaSR___R1__0 *** Group superset .ddf1_disks --> Active Subset name : ddf1_MegaSR___R1__0 size : 623046656 stride : 128 type : mirror status : ok subsets: 0 devs : 2 spares : 0
Unbelievably simple after I had waded through failed attempts at using Intel’s RAID Web Console 2, Intel’s Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), Intel’s Damn? Platform Control Command Line Interface (DPCCLI), Intel’s Active System Console (IASC), and who knows what else.
Linux had the answer the entire time in a scriptable format. I’d feel bad for all that time I spent, except I’m too excited about finally being able to add this controller to the cronjob that tells me how my RAID arrays are doing every morning.