Proliant CSB-6 Raid Drivers for Fedora

[AWC Maillists]

Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-11-04 at 10:48 -0800, William Hewitt wrote:
> 
>>Slightly off topic.....
>>
>>Has anyone had any experience with getting these drivers into a
>>"virgin" HP and then installing Redhat/Fedora? If so, can someone give
>>me a clue - like which one will work? HP's site is not too obvious or
>>straightforward....
>>
> 
> 
> you don't need drivers for this software raid; you can just use the
> dmraid software tool!
> 
> 
Errr, you do if the Kernel does not even recognize the controller drives 
at all.  (Which it does not with this esoteric controller.) And I am 
always amazed how people seems to think using software raid is as good a 
solution as using hardware raid.  Come on, there is no comparison, 
hardware RAID is faster and more reliable and has little to no CPU 
overhead.  Software raid can be CPU intensive and not as reliable.

As for the CDB-6 RAID drivers... I personally gave up.  I talked with 
HP's Linux department at length and there is no source code available 
for the CSB-6 drivers.  They released some RPMs and floppy images, but 
they are only available for a few Linux distributions (Fedora is not one 
of them.)  Not a single one of the drivers released by HP/Compaq 
supports the 2.6 kernal so it does not look very good.

I ended up just disabling the onboard RAID controller completely and 
went with an Adaptec RAID card (which worked out of the box)  configured 
as a RAID5 array with 4x300MB drives.

If you use RH9, RHEL2, HP does offers install floppy disc images that 
you use during the install process to provide the appropriate drivers 
during setup.  (Hint: look for instructions on using a driver disc 
during an install of Linux...)

Good luck and report back if you manage to get it working in Fedora