Yesterday I spent some time setting up the xServe at the new office… It’s a very nice server. It’s going to be replacing a blue & white G3 for our file serving duties. It’s a bit of a step up. There was one minor problem while setting it up, so pardon me while I geek out a bit and post the solution here:
Read the manual.
By which I mean read the big annoying sixty page PDF manual, not the simple eight page one.
We got the server with an internal hardware RAID card, and we wanted to have the three internal drives set up as a RAID 5 array. For those of you who aren’t “in the know” who’ve chosen to wade through this anyway, that means that the server will treat the three physical hard drives as if they were one big logical drive, with the added bonus that if one of the physical drives fails, we can just replace it and the computer will automatically rebuild the data. It’s good to have that sort of redundancy in a server.
Anyway, the simple eight page manual gives you five simple steps to set up the RAID array.
- Start up off of the CD
- Launch “Terminal” from the “Installer” menu
- Use the
megaraidcommand to build the array - Format and partition the array using Disk Tools
- Install the server software
The trouble is that this doesn’t work. You need to insert a step between 4 and 5: Reboot the server.
Do that and everything is both hunky and dory. Fail to reboot and the installer will refuse to put anything on the RAID disc. It’s clearly spelled out in the big PDF, but would it have killed them to have put just that one simple line in the short instructions?