Thursday, June 5, 2008

Adaptec 29320 ALP-R with SCO OpenServer 5.0.6a

Getting (specifically) the Adaptec 29320ALP-R PCI-X card to work with 5.0.6.

First issue taken care of - disable HostRAID as instructed by all drivers that are listed below.

Initial Problems

1. The SCO 5.0.6 driver for ad320 here:

ftp://ftp.sco.com/pub/openserver5/drivers/OSR506/btld/ad320/

Lists 29320ALP as supported (whether there was an ALP without the ALP-R I can't determine).

After installing, configuring a drive/tape, and rebooting, the device isn't visible. Driver failed.

2. Most of the time basic BTLDs work from 5.0.7 (as long as it doesn't have management stuff dependent on 5.0.7 kernel changes). So trying this one:

ftp://ftp.sco.com/pub/openserver5/drivers/OSR507/btld/ad320/

It's the same driver! No point trying.

3. Next guess is to check Adaptec's site. Taking a look at their download section for the 29320ALP-R and "SCO Unix":

http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/downloads/unix/sco_unix?productId=ASC-29320ALP-R&dn=Adaptec+SCSI+Card+29320ALP-R

Only 5.0.7 listed, this could cause some alarms, but it's worth a shot. Unfortunately this one breaks the kernel. If you don't know how to fix the .c and .h files in the kernel your only option now is to reinstall 5.0.6.

This makes you less likely to take chances if you don't have a fast recovery process. Luckily I have a VM sandbox to test driver installs first (which only proves that 5.0.6 will install/rebuild the kernel, not that the driver will actually work with the hardware).

4
. Poke around the SCO FTP site a bit (it's become very messy), and looks like something a bit newer:

ftp://ftp.sco.com/pub/openserver5/507/drivers/ad320_1.1/

The README notes 2004 instead of 2003 as the year of release, that's promising. But no mention of what changes were made that might make it more compatible. But this one works, hooray!

What was the problem?

Usually cards are listed exactly as they are called in drivers and PCI-X support in 5.0.6 was very limited even toward the end. My guess is it could be combination of newer ALP-R revisions of the 29320ALP card, perhaps the addition of the PCI-X bus with possibly a new device ID that wasn't recognised by previous drivers.

Now add user confusion with:

  1. SCO's FTP site doesn't have the working 5.0.7 driver in the 5.0.6 section of the FTP site.
  2. SCO's FTP site having a completely different base sub directory for a whole pile of updated drivers that list 5.0.6a as supported.
  3. Adaptec's support downloads for "SCO Unix" only list 5.0.7 files, which cause kernel rebuild errors (which must be fixed or reinstalled).

Solution

Install the ad320 1.1 driver from SCO's 5.0.7 separate driver section.

Either as the BTLD (link=ad320) or post-install as follows:

marry -a /tmp/ad320_btld.img
mount -o nolog /dev/marry/tmp/ad320_btld.img /mnt
/etc/btldinstall /mnt


Continue with mkdev tape/hd, whatever, reboot, and voila.

Hopefully this helps someone, good luck.