Openfiler Driver Issues

From CafeWiki

This is the original installation description for Openfiler 2.3. It seems that the Intel G43 chipset isn't compatible with the linux kernel in 2.3.

Hardware

This hardware turned out to be incompatible with Openfiler 2.3:

• Intel DG43NB motherboard (supports 6 SATA drives)
• Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Processor
• 4 GB PC6400 DDR2 800MHz Memory
• 2 Western Digital 640GB Caviar 7200rpm SATA hard drives
  • to be installed as a RAID 1 array
  • 320 GB for a NAS general file store
  • 320 GB for iSCSI LUNs for ESXi virtual servers to use
• 2 Seagate 300GB Barracuda 7200.9 SATA hard drives
  • to be installed as RAID 1 array
  • 150 GB as an iSCSI target for WinXP backups
  • 150 GB as an iSCSI target for MAC Time Machine backups
• 1 Maxtor 250 GB DiamondMax 10 7200 PATA hard drive
  • Openfiler boot disk
• Antec Sonata III case with 500W power supply

Installation

The steps to install Openfiler and configure the basic open filer settings are described here. The configuration and administration of the network storage under Openfiler is captured on the Openfiler page.

1. Download the latest Openfiler distribution from the Openfiler Downloads site. Given the hardware selected above the correct download is the "bare metal" x86-64 ISO install image. Openfiler also provides various install images for virtualized environments.

2. Burn the ISO to a CD, pop it in the CD drive and boot the storage server from the CD and follow the prompts.

3. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that this process could be a little bumpy, but who'd have thought it would go completely off the rails as soon as I picked the language and keyboard. "No driver found - unable to find any devices of the type needed for this installation type" - what's with that??

• The problem appears to be with motherboard BIOS settings and having an IDE boot drive the default BIOS settings of "ATA/IDE Mode = Native" and "Configure SATA as = IDE" seemed correct.
• on the Openfiler forums a similar sounding problem had a suggested solution of installing openfiler with the command "linux all-generic-ide=1", so I tried that and it worked!

4. I worked my way through the installation script, formatting the drive as suggested (I'd disconnected all the SATA drives by this point for simplicity). That all went OK until I rebooted the box at the end of the install.

5. "Kernel panic"?? That's bad, right?

6. Hours and hours of monkeying around ensued at this point, resulting in the conclusion that the DG43NB motherboard has some kind of fundamental unsuitability for use with linux of any sort. Openfiler, FreeNAS, Unbuntu - it didn't seem to matter, nothing would install or run unless the SATA mode in the BIOS was set to IDE. This kind of defeats the purpose of using nice fast SATA drives.

...

(n). Bah!

(n+1). Humbug!!