We have around 100 mira hosts.

Some of them used to be used as vpshosts and longrunningcluster, however they are nearly 10 years old and severely behind spec-wise. We're slowly phasing them out to make room for new hardware. The systems that remain are used as testnodes. A small subset are still in the longrunningcluster.

As these machines age, they continue to MCE and lock up at higher rates. To make room for new LRC hosts, we've begun e-wasting miras.

UPDATE This can be done now simply by running ansible-playbook firmware.yml --limit="miraXXX*" --tags="areca"

The latest firmware for ARC-1222 controllers can be obtained from here.

The latest firmware for ARC-1880 controllers can be obtained from here.

My process for flashing ARC-1222 firmware manually is below. This assumes you've downloaded and extracted the firmware zip. The same process can be used for other Areca controllers. Just use the proper firmware BIN files.

scp /home/dgalloway/BIOS/areca/ARC1212_1222/ARC1212* ubuntu@$host.front.sepia.ceph.com:/home/ubuntu/
ssh $host
sudo -i
for file in $(ls /home/ubuntu/ARC1212*.BIN); do cli64 sys updatefw path=$file; done
for file in $(ls /home/ubuntu/ARC1212*.BIN); do rm $file; done

Erasing a RAID and setting controller to JBOD mode

cli64 set password=0000
cli64 vsf delete vol=1
cli64 rsf delete raid=1
cli64 sys mode p=1

Stop Beeper

Parameter: <p=<0(mute)|1(disabled)|2(enabled)»

cli64 set password=0000
cli64 sys beeper p=0

This process is a bit annoying. Depending on which order the HDD backplane is connected to the RAID controller, the order of drive bays on these machines will be:

1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8

OR

5 6 7 8
1 2 3 4

To add to the annoyingness, it's not possible to light up the red/failed LED manually on the drive sleds. So when working with the labs team, it's easiest to have the admin be in front of the machine and either light up the failed drive or light up drive 1 and have them count to the drive bay.

To light up a drive, I typically just do dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null if I want to light up drive 1.

If a drive just has failing sectors but is still readable, it's easiest to light up that drive (smart.sh will tell you which drive letter to use dd on). If the drive has completely failed, light up drive 1 (usually /dev/sda) and have the admin count up to it.