Promise WebPAM PROe (VTrak M300i) as an image NAS
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OK Guys here’s a new one for you, I hope.
I have a piece of hardware coming offline here soon, because our backbone runs windows everything. Servers, desktops, laptops etc and since we can no longer get support for Windows Server 2003.
We clearly use fog (since I’m posting here as our imaging tool of choice)
I would love to use this device as NAS for my images.
Has anyone else used this as NAS for their images
Now I know the device is compatible with RedHat and SuSE Linux, (windows server 2003), is there an easy way to determine if it’s compatible with Ubuntu for this purpose?
Some product information [url]http://firstweb.promise.com/support/file/manual/6_VTrak_M-Class_Product_v1.3.pdf[/url]
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A lot of interest, but no ideas…
Hrm…
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I don’t have any of this equipment, I would be happy to offer expertise if I had it.
In theory yes, you can. It comes down to how much time you want to spend getting it working if it’s not a drop in replacement (if linux doesn’t have drivers for your machines.
In the past, I have used old server equipment for FOG Servers and NAS, but I had difficulty with the Raid controllers and wound up removing them and using the system that way.
You might need to give it a try by installing a Debian flavor (Ubuntu works) on the machine and working from there. If you find there are drivers missing, or you have error because the hardware is not behaving properly, I would move on the RedHat/ SuSE and see what it has to offer (being enterprise based it may support hardware that Debian does not).
The only way to find out is to try, and of course document it and share with the rest of us
I should further note, the machines I was working with were IBM Netfinity and eServers.
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nope, won’t work at all. just send it to me for disposal ;D
but seriously, i would set it up for use as an ESXi datastore and then install my fog server to a Debian VM stored on it. -
OK guys,
I know it’s a recovery of an older thread, but I need some help.
We’ve got it that we can mount this iscsi drive on the ubuntu fog server, and even mount it within fog so we can configure it, load images to the share etc.
But we can’t get tftp to work for this share. Any help on what we’re missing would be great. Thanks in advance.
Additionally and this may be on a side note we are getting an alert “usbhid 2-1.6.3:1.1: couldn’t find an input interrupt endpoint” Now I believe this to be due to the KVM we are using. I’m fine with the alert, but is there anyway to get it to bypass this alert more quickly, as it is now it takes 2 maybe 3 minutes to get past this and either boot into fog, or image the machine.
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if your using iSCSI why don’t you let a hypervisor deal with all the pain. then the fog thinks the drive is local and will run along thinking everything is ‘normal’
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You mean, move our entire fog server onto the iSCSI device as a hypervisor client?
Well we’ve considered it, but the trouble is, this device only works on Windows Server 2003, and Redhat 2 or something like that (officially).
Plus the device is pretty old having a total of 512 MB of RAM.
If you’d like to point me in the “right” direction I can look into it, and see if it’s worth it for us to try and do that. Just means we’d have to setup our ubuntu server, dhcp server, and fog server.
It wasn’t painful to do… but we really just wanted to initially use the device as a NAS device to store our images.
Lastly this entire unit has been setup in a private network, so we can get much higher imaging speeds from around 35 minutes, down to 4-6 minutes. (even running concurrent imaging)
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have you considered fog as a storage node install to the device, and just add it to the main fog server?
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That is how we are trying to add the device.
It’s iscsi, we’ve been able to add it has a storage node, and set it as primary and active. But receive a TFTP timeout when we try to image a machine using it as the storage node.
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did network booting work before? adding this storage node shouldn’t change anything for tftp
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Network boot does work from the local drive on the server.
It fails to work from the iSCSI drive though. We’ve copied, and confirmed the permissions, confirmed the drive settings Master and active etc.
It continually times out at TFTP. swapping the master drive back to the internal hard drive, imaging works. (within the fog storage node administration)
