Major Install Issues Dell 720xd 24TB Array

[Damon Rouse]

Hi Everyone

I'm really hoping that someone will be able to help me with my install issues. I've searched the group and found a few things to try, but nothing has worked. The 720xd's Perc H710P is certified for Ubuntu and the SO installer sees the VD just fine.

I've tried manually creating the /boot, /swap and / partitions in during install with /boot at the beginning and / at the end of the disk. When I do this, the installer says, you need a "reserved BIOS boot area" so I go back and recreate everything to reflect this. I then choose the device for the boot loader location. I've tried everything but the /swap in all my attempts. No matter what I try, the end result is a grub fatal error (see attached pics)

Any help is VERY much appreciated. Thanks for your time!

Damon

[Andrew Colfelt]

Apologies in advance for not being able to offer a been-there/done-that/here's-how-to-resolve-it kind of response...

My first thought is: "how do things go if you just accept all defaults, rather than getting fancy right out of the gate ?"

Unless you are already an SO veteran, you are probably going to re-install/re-set-up this machine several times before you arrive at a configuration you are convinced suits your environment appropriately.

I have a similar machine ( R720 ), but I am using VMware ESXi v5.5 to host SO.

With your setup, you'd have to pay me the cost of 10 servers in order to convince me that it was worth my time and money to dedicate this entire piece of hardware to SO.

If dedicated-physical is your preference, then I dismount my soap box thusly:

Since you are using an array, does the 'physical' placement of volumes on a single 'virtual' disk pay you anything in return for your trouble ? I mean, with all those spindles and heads working in parallel, does it matter 'where' these volumes reside ? After all, where exactly is "where" in this case ?

Nevertheless, if there is real value to be had here, could you create additional virtual disks in the array, and present these as separate physical volumes to SO in order to accomplish what you want ?

NB: the RAID setup in fancy-BIOS is incapable of partitioning more than one VD, so be advised ( don't ask me how I know ! ).

If you want more than one VD, access the PERC BIOS using Ctrl-R during POST. There, you can set up VDs exactly as you like.

Maybe that helps, maybe it doesn't.

Nevermind that, Welcome to SO !!

[Damon Rouse]

Hi Andrew 

Same results just running the installer straight through with the defaults too.  

If not simple or recommended to carve out the partitions via the installer, I'll create more VDs in the array manager. Any best practices for this, I mean should I create all the same partitions or just one for boot and  SO?

I've only ran SO on box as a POC, which was cake.

I'm still pretty new to Linux, so just trying to learn the right way to do things

Thanks for your time

D

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[Andrew Colfelt]

Relative to most members here, to be sure, I'm pretty new to Linux myself, so that's why I didn't give you a more thoughtful answer.

I'll leave it to those with far more experience than I to recommend an approach to volumes and partitioning that is optimal for *nix.

Suffice it to say, disk space for full packet capture *is* worth planning for, and for that you should allocate a separate VD just for this, and then hook it up to /nsm using the procedure here ( Method #1 worked for me, while Method #2 didn't seem to apply, at least not as far as I have been able to tell... ):

https://code.google.com/p/security-onion/wiki/NewDisk

As for your grub issue, although we have the same hardware, or close to it, I have no experience with installing SO on the physical hardware.

If you haven't yet become enamored with ESXi, perhaps you might take a look at VMware vSphere Essentials. The 60-day trial has all features enabled, and then after that you go into free mode, which has limited features.

This stuff is invaluable.

http://store.vmware.com/store/vmware/en_US/pd/productID.282883900&src=WWW_eBIZ_productpage_Essentials_Buy_US

[Damon Rouse]

We have a couple ESXi hosts running and about 20 VMs humming along. I love it too! But, we don't have the storage available at the moment for SO and FPC. I'll check method one out, thanks Andrew

If anyone has installed SO to similar hardware and array setup, can you please let me know what's the best way? I'm still a little confused by what needs to be done in the array controller and then in the installer. Like I said, still pretty new Linux and have never installed it on a system like this?

Thanks everyone
Damon

[Doug Burks]

Hi Damon,

How large are you making the /boot partition?

Have you tried telling it to install the bootloader on /dev/sda instead of sda1?

Could this be a UEFI issue?
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI

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[Jason Canup]

Hi Damon-

I was in your shoes not long ago. I dont have the beefy system you have to run SO, but I'm pretty sure your errors are being generated because of errors in partitioning.

Doug mentioned UEFI, which is certainly a possibility, but the UEFI issues I saw caused the system to not boot after installation completed "successfully". Your errors seem to be while in SO.

Here's how I have my partitions set up on 4TB:

1 MB reserved for bios
100 /boot
16GB Swap (equal to the amount of system memory)
Remainder for /

[Damon Rouse]

Hi Doug

I've tried 250, 300 and 500 MB for the /boot partition

I've also tried installing the bootloader on every option in the pulldown when I get the error =/

UEFI is disabled, but I'll check your link out.

Thanks
Damon

[Damon Rouse]

Hi Jason

Did you create those partitions with the installer or in your array manager?

Thanks
Damon

[Jason Canup]

With the installer. I just chose the option "Something Else".

[Damon Rouse]

Thanks…I’ll give that a shot this afternoon. Tried that yesterday, with no love. Going to recreate/initialize the array and VD

On May 2, 2014, at 1:20 PM, Jason Canup <jca...@gmail.com> wrote:

> With the installer. I just chose the option "Something Else".
>

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[Damon Rouse]

Thanks for the help everyone. Not sure exactly what the root cause was, but I'm all set now! Recreating/reinitializing the array/VD and following Jason's partition example did the trick. Now on to the setup of SO.

Thanks again everyone!