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After unpack­ing, rack­ing, and mount­ing the JBOD, I waited until the week­end had started before pow­er­ing down the server and installing the RAID card. Connected it all up, rebooted into the Adaptec BIOS, and con­fig­ured the 6x 1TB dri­ves into a RAID6 array. After that, I installed the RAID StorageManager off of Sun’s web­site, and then the “Common Array Manager” soft­ware. CAM is sup­posed to pro­vide a web GUI to an organization’s worth of Sun JBODs, so you can update JBOD firmware and query sta­tus and what­not from a sin­gle inter­face. There’s client and server bits writ­ten in Java that run on the var­i­ous boxes, so the data path was going to look like this:

JBOD -> XEN dom0 run­ning remote proxy tool -> XEN domU run­ning web GUI

I say “was going” and “sup­posed to” because all the remote proxy tool in CAM ended up doing was con­sis­tently trig­ger­ing a ker­nel panic in the aacraid dri­ver when­ever it’s detec­tion code fired up.

Take a long drag off the irony of dri­ver and firmware issues, and down­load the latest-n-greatest aacraid dri­ver and firmware from Intel via Sun, and update. Same results. Repeat in var­i­ous con­fig­u­ra­tions, and before throw­ing in the towel, get a basic dump and file a bug. I didn’t put any more seri­ous thought into debug­ging it sim­ply because this whole thing has to be up and run­ning yes­ter­day, and the last time I asked for doc­u­men­ta­tion on the topic, I was rebuffed with a vari­ant of this clas­sic: “If you were smart enough to debug the ker­nel, you wouldn’t need doc­u­men­ta­tion on how to debug the kernel.”

Take a moment to stand in awe of the mas­sive poi­so­nous cobag­gery involved in that state­ment being offered to some­one who wants to help fix a crasher. I’ll wait.

That kind of shit would never fly in any GNOME venue, which is why GNOME kicks so much ass.

Update: The cobag­gery about ker­nel devel­op­ment did not come from Sun or any rep­re­sen­ta­tive of any com­pany involved in open-source, and was unre­lated to this sit­u­a­tion at all. I relate it sim­ply as it per­tains to debug­ging ker­nel issues, and why I don’t do it.