Excellent work Peter, thanks!
Here's my experience so far, running on Ubuntu 9.04 on a 3GHz Core 2 Duo E8500, 4GB RAM with a Asus P5Q-E (dual-LAN) motherboard.
I connected the DroboPro via USB and downloaded the latest .deb from SF and installed it. Although the deb installed fine I wasn't able to use the UI until I also installed qt. Maybe this should be added as a dependency to the deb? Once I qt was installed, the UI launched fine as root.
I was able to resize and format the partition as ext3 fine, too. Took a long time, of course, but it worked ok. I also played around with some buttons in the UI. Everything seemed to work as expected, although when I later checked the console I saw this error repeated a bunch of times:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/var/lib/python-support/python2.6/DroboGUI.py", line 240, in __updateStatus
self.__updateLEDs() # only update display...
File "/var/lib/python-support/python2.6/DroboGUI.py", line 162, in __updateLEDs
while ( i < self.drobo.SlotCount() ):
File "/var/lib/python-support/python2.6/Drobo.py", line 549, in SlotCount
self.GetSubPageConfig()
File "/var/lib/python-support/python2.6/Drobo.py", line 1003, in GetSubPageConfig
result=self.__getsubpage( 0x01, 'BBBQ' )
File "/var/lib/python-support/python2.6/Drobo.py", line 449, in __getsubpage
raise DroboException("cmdout is unexpected length")
Drobo.DroboExceptionProblem accessing a Drobo: cmdout is unexpected length
Unfortunately, I wasn't paying attention to the console as I was messing around in the UI, so I don't know exactly what caused this. It might've been when I was changing the LUN size.
I then started doing some simple copy tests and timing the results.
Using a single 6.5GB file, over USB, I sustained a consistently average read & write transfer rate of 27MB/s (217Mb/s).
I then downloaded open-scsi and followed the directions here:
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-setup-debian-ubuntu-linux-iscsi-initiator/
I had to connect the DroboPro to a Mac in order to set the iSCSI target address manually.
After setting this up, I was able to mount the DroboPro as normal, but droboview complained that it couldn't find the unit. I did note that using USB, the DroboPro showed up under /dev/sdc, but using iSCSI it came up under /dev/sdb. I don't know if that's significant or not. The output from lshw shows the following for the iSCSI connection:
*-scsi
physical id: 2
logical name: scsi10
*-disk
description: SCSI Disk
product: DroboPro
vendor: DROBO
physical id: 0.0.0
bus info: scsi@10:0.0.0
logical name: /dev/sdb
version: 1.00
serial: [redacted]
size: 8TiB (8796GB)
capabilities: gpt-1.00 partitioned partitioned:gpt
configuration: ansiversion=5 guid=166695de-9ddc-4ec2-a28c-cb639215ed88
*-volume
description: Data partition
physical id: 1
bus info: scsi@10:0.0.0,1
logical name: /dev/sdb1
logical name: /media/drobo
serial: 653459b9-58a7-4625-b3b5-56ab1832b741
capacity: 8191GiB
configuration: mount.fstype=ext3 mount.options=rw,errors=continue,data=ordered name=ext2 state=mounted
Running drobom -v 63 status gave the following:
examining: /dev/sda
id: (0, 0, 0, 0, 'ATA Maxtor 6Y250M0 YAR5\x00\x00\x00\x00')
rejected: vendor is ATA Maxtor 6Y250M0 YAR5 (not from DRI)
examining: /dev/sdb
rejected: failed to identify LUN
returning list: []
No Drobos discovered
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to actually read or write to the DroboPro at this point. It would go in a strange disconnect-connect loop.
If I make any more progress I'll report back.
Thanks for everyone's hard work on this!
S~