Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Russian Doll Syndrome / Please Monitor Your RAID Volumes

As part of setting up nagios monitoring for customers, I always make sure that the RAID volumes are being monitored on the DB servers.  More often than not, I have to tell the customer there are bad disks in one or more of the RAID volumes.  Don't be one of those customers, make sure you monitor the RAID volumes on your PostgreSQL (and other) servers!

So, today I was setting up some of this same monitoring for LSI RAID controllers in a Dell server using the check_sasraid_megaraid nagios plugin.   This plugin requires the LSI SNMP installer as well as net-snmp and a few other miscellaneous packages.

This brings us to the Russian Doll Syndrome.  I download the zip file from the LSI support site and unzip it to find a zip full of zips:

 $ unzip 12.10.03.01_MegaRAID_SNMP_Installers.zip
Archive:  12.10.03.01_MegaRAID_SNMP_Installers.zip
 extracting: SAS_SNMP_Win_Installer.zip 
 extracting: SAS_SNMP_Linux_Installer.zip 
 extracting: SAS_SNMP_Linux_x64_Installer.zip 
 extracting: SAS_SNMP_Solaris_Installer.zip 
 extracting: SAS_SNMP_Solaris11x86_Installer.zip 
  inflating: 12.10.03.01_MegaRAID_SNMP_Installers.txt 

Ok, fine, they have a zip for each architecture, so let's unzip the Linux_x64 one and get on with this:

$ unzip SAS_SNMP_Linux_x64_Installer.zip
Archive:  SAS_SNMP_Linux_x64_Installer.zip
  inflating: MD5CheckSum.txt        
 extracting: SAS_SNMP_Linux_x64_Installer-12.10-0301.zip

Oh, sweet, another zip file!

$ unzip SAS_SNMP_Linux_x64_Installer-12.10-0301.zip
Archive:  SAS_SNMP_Linux_x64_Installer-12.10-0301.zip
  inflating: readme.txt             
 extracting: sas_snmp_64bit.tar.gz  

And inside that, we find a tarball:

$ tar xvfz sas_snmp_64bit.tar.gz
sas_snmp-12.10-0301.x86_64.rpm

And finally an RPM.  Yeesh LSI, why couldn't we just have the RPM right inside the SAS_SNMP_Linux_x64_Installer.zip file or even just in the top level zip file?

So, all kidding aside, please make sure you're monitoring the RAID volumes on your PostgreSQL servers!
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4 comments:

  1. But now it's compressed! I mean C O M P R E S S E D !

    Think of all the space you save on your disks. Now you can buy smaller ones. Smaller disks mean less DC space. This means green IT.

    This will save the polar bears!

    (yup RAID monitoring, saved my behind quite a few times!)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies

    1. Not only is it compressed, but it's compressed with more than 1 algorithm!

      Delete

  2. You might want to take a look at the awesome debian packages from hwraid http://hwraid.le-vert.net/wiki/DebianPackages and the puppet module to set them up for you https://github.com/Jimdo/puppet-raid

    ReplyDelete
    Replies

    1. Oh! That's wonderful! Is there a PPA set up for it?

      Also, any idea if there's a RHEL/CentOS/SL version of this?

      Delete

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