Fussin’ wussin’flippin’ software!

Today at work we recieved two Infortrend SCSI/SATA RAID arrays. They came with no documentation other than a CDROM and a quick install guide.

OK, I thought, they’ll have the documentation on the CD as many things do these days (including some laptops whos manuals on the CD start by saying “Warning: Before you unpack the computer…”) so I popped it into Euclid’s DVD-ROM drive.

I found three PDF files on there along with installation programs, so I took a look at the PDFs. One was for the advertising blurb, another for the quick install guide and the last was the packing list!

Right, this is going nowhere fast. I’ll try installing the software on Euclid before I try on the server system I’m going to be putting these devices on. After all the server is in use at the moment serving other disks and I don’t want to disturb it. Not only this but I need to find out how to configure the boxes to use other SCSI IDs before I fit them. And maybe, once the software’s installed there might actually be some documentation.

So, I run the install script for Solaris. It starts a JAVA install program and I follow the instructions…

At the end of the install my window manager crashes and other things start going loopy. I manage to log out and get back in with a working X session only to discover that init is taking 100% CPU, so I warn everyone and do a reboot.

The system doesn’t come up properly.. It just constantly looping between starting up the ethernet interface, fsck’ing /, complaining that /proc can’t be mounted and /var/run already is mounted and finally that the kernel doesn’t support overlapping swap partitions on c0t0d0s1. The system is hosed.

Tomorrow I’m going to have to try to recover the machine by booting off CDROM otherwise I’m just going to have to rebuild the machine from scratch and hope that /usr/users hasn’t been wiped.

Grrrrr!