HP Smart Storage Administrator CLI hpssacli "Error: No controllers detected." on Ubuntu Server 14.04.1

Question

I've successfully installed Ubuntu Server 14.04.1 LTS on the HP Microserver ProLiant Gen8. Before installing, I booted into the Intelligent Provisioning and set up a RAID 1 with two disks. During installation, I had to inject HP Dynamic Smart Array B120i controller drivers for the Ubuntu 3.13 kernel to see the logical RAID 1 volume (see launchpad.net/~hp-iss-team/+archive/ubuntu/hp-storage).

Now the system is up and running. In order to detect a disk failure in the future, I want to use the HP tool hpssacli. But the tool states the following

root@mail:/home/goodkat# hpssacli controller all show

Error: No controllers detected. Possible causes:
       - The driver for the installed controller(s) is not loaded.
       - On LINUX, the scsi_generic (sg) driver module is not loaded.
       See the README file for more details.

I've tried the following

root@mail:/home/goodkat# lsmod | grep hp
hpilo                  17381  0 
shpchp                 37032  0

root@mail:/home/goodkat# dpkg -s hpvsa
Package: hpvsa
Status: install ok installed
Priority: standard
Section: kernel
Installed-Size: 26
Maintainer: Hewlett Packard <[email protected]>
Architecture: amd64
Version: 1.2.12-115-3.13tubuntu2
Provides: hpvsa
Depends: hpvsa-3.13.0-32-generic (= 1.2.12-115-3.13tubuntu2)
Description: Meta-package for installing the latest hpvsa drivers.
Please put an extended description here (meta).

The driver seems to be installed. The scsi_generic is available too

root@mail:/home/goodkat# cat /proc/scsi/sg/version
30534   3.5.34 [20061027]

modprobe sg does not help. The hpsscli supports the B120i controller as written here and this is an Ubuntu certified the server.

Solution

This is question is more appropriate for Server Fault. But that said, why jump through hoops with tweaking the kernel to get that tool tweaked specifically for the HP Dynamic Smart Array B120i controller? Why not just use smartmontools?

The smartmontools package contains two utility programs (smartctl and smartd) to control and monitor storage systems using the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System (SMART) built into most modern ATA and SCSI harddisks. In many cases, these utilities will provide advanced warning of disk degradation and failure.

Just run sudo apt-get install smartmontools and then you can define devices in the config here /etc/smartd.conf to email an alert when an event happens. More usage details here.

Comments

[bastian]

Good point. I need a tool to monitor and a tool to rebuild the raid array after a disk has failed. I just remembered that the Smart Storage Administrator is also available from Intelligent Provisioning. So I will use smartmontools to get noticed and then reboot into SSA to see if the array rebuilds. Thanks.