LSI 3801 JBOD card and Ubuntu 12.04 / 64 bit

[J]

On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 3:34 PM, Alan McKay <alan.mckay at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey folks,
>
> I've got a 12.04 install and need to connect a couple of old Sun J4400
> arrays.   The only card Sun will guarantee works with that is an LSI
> 3801 (ES).  Well, there were 3 options - 2 LSI and an Adaptec.
> That's the one I was able to get since they are older.
>
> But I go to the LSI website and they only have drivers for SLES and
> RHEL4,5 and 6.  There are a crapload of RPMs in the tarball and I"m
> not sure how to sort that out to run alien on them.
>
> I did seem to sort it down to
> kmod-lsi-mptbase-4.28.00.00_rhel6.1-1.x86_64.rpm which alien converted
> to kmod-mptbase_4.28.00.00rhel6.1-2_amd64.deb
>
> But honestly I'm out of my league here and am just poking in the dark.
>
> Anyone know what I can do here?
>
> I don't have the card in the machine yet - so maybe I'll get lucky and
> it will just work.   What are the chances of that?
>
> My other option if I can't get this going is to wipe the box and
> install Scientific 6.1 and use the RHEL drivers.  But who wants to run
> RHEL when you can run Ubuntu? :-)

Have you even tried putting the card in the machine and seeing if one
of the existing LSI drivers (mpt_scsih or mpt_sas) will work?

As for the deb you created with alien, does it install if you use dpkg on it?

Generally, however, those drivers are compiled for specific kernels
and headers and won't work on different kernels.

Getting back to Alien, I've never been successful with using it.  What
you can do, however is install rpm2cpio and do this:

mkdir foo
cd foo
cp /path/to/rpm .
rpm2cpio file.rpm |cpio -id

rpm2cpio will convert the rpm file to a cpio container (RPM is really
just gzipped cpio anyway) and dump that to stdout.  You pipe it
through cpio and it'll extract the contents in $PWD.  Then you can
pull out the individual driver file you're looking for.

But from looking just briefly, things seem to be pointing to mpt_sas
for the 3801 cards...  which is why I ask if you've actually tried the
card in the machine yet.  There seem to have been several 3801 models,
and I couldn't easily find anything about an ES model (thought I did
find an ER model and an X model).