[Beowulf] OT: some quick Areca rpm packages for interested users

[Joe Landman]

Greetings Yaroslav:

Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:
> Thanks Joe
> 
> I just want to comment on my experience with Areca.
> 
> That is pity that Areca's drivers got kicked even from -mm devel branch
> of linux mainstream kernel (unfortunately I don't remember in
> which exact version it has happened). Recent driver provided by Areca

I thought they were folded in at the 2.6.19 level.

> seems to work fine for me (after I upgraded power supply of the box,
> which was mentioned by Areca as the main possible cause of the
> instability in operation we had). So problem seems to be resolved, but I
> disliked that the areca developers kept the same version of the driver
> (thus file name) while he introduced some changes, which they named (in
> my inquiry to them) as the simple refactoring of the code without any
> change in functionality. I saw other people in the mailing lists
> complaining about the same or similar issue
> (http://uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0611.3/0590.html).

Hmmmm.  I simply packaged the drivers, specifically so that some 
dominant north american distributions and their derivatives, could use 
them easily.  It seems that someone caught an issue where I did not 
generate a new initrd with this driver within it.  Will look into doing 
it at some point.  I am not sure that RHEL5 and its variants will have 
this support within it.

Note also that in the same directories are xfs builds, for these same 
users.  This "fixes" a glaring omission on their part (this has been 
beaten to death in their fora, not worth wasting electrons attempting to 
convince them that their mistake is a mistake).

> So, things working well, but code was orphaned by linux kernel
> developers (read more about some resolved and not resolved
> problems in the mailing lists
> http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-scsi&m=113597128115672&w=2
> http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-scsi&m=115226175822438&w=2),
> versioning is somewhat is inconsistent as I've mentioned
> 
> How do you do with your Areca? :-)

The units we have used have behaved well.  The major issue we have run 
into appears to be a mismatch between the driver and CLI tools (we 
package all of them of the correct versions).

We are supporting the RPMs for our customers systems.  So far no issues, 
and the Areca folks have been quite supportive and helpful.

Joe

> 
> On Wed, 20 Dec 2006, Joe Landman wrote:
> 
>> Hi folks:
> 
>>   We have put together some Areca RPMs for x86_64 systems.  RPMs for the Areca are available 
>> now in binary/source form at 
>> http://downloads.scalableinformatics.com/downloads/Scientific_Linux/4.4/x86_64/