Good Cheap Server - HP Proliant Microserver 4 BAY - OWNERS THREAD

God, this is painful stuff. My array built, I put on a fs, and then I could mount it, yay! Next was some minor setup to the fstab and the mdadm conf so that they would appear on next boot.

I reboot the system to discover that

a) that didn't work (I had to reactiate/mount manually)
b) one of the drives has gone missing.

It got even better though, while trying to make it work, each time I've rebooted it 'lost' another drive, and not always the same one. They all show up fine elsewhere so it's not the drives themselves. I'm now stumbling into another huge minefield of general ubuntu/linux issues to get this to work.

I really would rather have this on here so I can mess around with other light server duty (freeNAS seems like a 'waste' in that sense), but I cba to waste that much more time on this.

Does anyone else here have a USB key based linux distro, behaving itself with a software RAID setup? If so, please tell me how the hell you got it to behave!
 
I'm running ESXi without RAID so I can't confirm, but I'm told Debian supports the SATA controller much better than Ubuntu. Centos is based on Redhat which is officially supported by HP so I expect that will work well too.
 
beavis said:
I'm running ESXi without RAID so I can't confirm, but I'm told Debian supports the SATA controller much better than Ubuntu. Centos is based on Redhat which is officially supported by HP so I expect that will work well too.
Click to expand...

The thing is, that part seems fine. Finding and setting up the raid was easy. It just seems something else gets in the way when you next boot up. So near yet so far.

The frustrating part is, ubuntu server has options to configre this as you install, and presumably works fine from there onwards. You don't seem to be able to install that to a USB key though. I think I may just have to bung that 160GB HD in the top bay, I really wanted it to work from this flash drive, and it almost does!
 
Just thought I would say this, spoken to my supplier at work about getting these, all of them are gone from distribution, as apparently HP have discontinued it due to lack of demand.

I have asked him to clarify this, but if you want one, I would suggest get one soon.

Kimbie
 
Hmm, looks true unfortunately. This is a quick check with one of HP's distributors:

distribution-ms.jpg


Which is a pain as we quite liked them for small offices and were putting them out in quotes :rolleyes:
 
I wouldn't like to say. The January Top Value stuff I had through this morning lists the original part number - they might just swap the codes but who knows if they new code will be available before the end of January. Two of our distributors don't even list the new code yet...
 
HP Product Bulletin says the new SKU is:

Processor : (1) AMD Athlon™ II NEO N36L processor (1.3 GHz, 15W, 2MB)
Cache Memory : 2x 1MB Level 2
Memory : 1GB (1 x 1GB) PC3-10600E DDR3 UB ECC
Network Controller : Embedded NC107i PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Server Adapter
Storage Controller : Embedded SATA Controller with Embedded RAID (0, 1)
Hard Drive : 1x250GB Non-hot plug LFF SATA
Internal Storage : Non-Hot Plug SATA 4.0TB (4 x 1TB) Maximum
Optical Drive : None ships standard
Power Supply : 150W Non-Hot Plug, Non-Redundant Power Supply
Form Factor : Ultra Micro Tower
 
Ok, *maybe* I'm actually going to get this going before it kills me:



I am hopefully at the stage now where I just need to work out why it's not auto mounting correctly, and setup a samba share for it. If I do get it going, I'll post up a step by step guide (I'll just piece together all the increasingly angry emails I have sent to myself for quick reference!)
 
Guys, I'm going to move the 160gb into the top bay and lay it in there so I can stick another 2tb in the caddy.

Anyone done that already? Any advice? Extra molex needed or anything?
 
From what i've read you'll need a Molex->Sata power adapter and a SATA cable at least 45cms long.

Just ordered one of these myself (and 4x 2TB disks) and will be putting FreeBSD8.1 on to create a nice ZFS NAS to play with.

I've been having a play with FreeBSD/ZFS today in a VM on my laptop and was amazed at how nice it all works. Had a raidZ(raid5) array up and running and shared via nfs etc in a matter of a few commands!

Has anyone successfully got FreeBSD installed on this(i'm guessing from USB)?
Any compatibility problems?
 
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