Monitoring Dell Powervaults on Debian

At work we purchased two Dell Powervaults MD3200.  To configure them you need to install the management software.  Like always the software is only supported on Windows, Redhat Enterprise Linux or Suse enterprise Linux.  The management software is in fact written in Java.

Below I document how to install the management software on a Debian Squeeze machine. I based my work on the a howto by Laurent Coustet

• Download the cdrom with the powervault software from the Dell support site.
• Mount the iso file
  mount -o loop ~rgevaert/Downloads/Dell_MD32xx_RDVD_1.2.0.16_A05_R300052.iso /mnt
• Copy 'linux/mdsm/SMIA-LINUX-10[1].75.A6.16.bin' to the machine where you will build your Debian packages.
• Execute the bin file.
  ./SMIA-LINUX-10\[1\].75.A6.16.bin -i console
  Note that, if you enabled X forwarding when you did the SSH the installer will start a graphical installer, even with the '-i' option...
• Answer the questions, but don't install in the default location. E.g. choose '/opt/dell_installer/mdstoragemanager'.  Also install the full bundle: Typical (Full Installation)
• In '/opt/dell_installer/mdstoragemanager’ you will find several rpm files: SMagent.rpm, SMclient.rpm, SMruntime.rpm, SMutil.rpm.
• Use alien to unpack the rpm packages. SMclient.rpm is an architecture independent rpm, the others are actually 32bit rpms. Because some of the package are 32bit and I'm running on a 64 bit system I can't directly convert to a deb package.  Also, the files in the rpms have some problems we need to fix them before creating the deb package.
• Conversion of SMclient.rpm to debian package
  alien -g SMclient.rpm
cd SMclient-10.75.G6.16
echo "BASEDIR=/opt/dell/mdstoragemanager" > var/opt/SM/LAUNCHER_ENV
sed -i 's,^source,.,' opt/dell/mdstoragemanager/client/SMclient opt/dell/mdstoragemanager/client/SMcli opt/dell/mdstoragemanager/client/SMmonitor
sed -i 's,smclient$,smclient-dell,' debian/control
sed -i 's|Depends.*|Depends: ia32-sun-java6-bin, x11-utils, xauth|' debian/control
sed -i 's,^smclient,smclient-dell,' debian/changelog
ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/ia32-java-6-sun-1.6.0.26 opt/dell/mdstoragemanager/jre
dpkg-buildpackage -b
• Conversion of SMutil.rpm to debian package
  alien -g SMutil.rpm
cd SMutil-10.01.A6.04
sed -i 's,^source,.,' opt/dell/mdstoragemanager/util/SMdevices
sed -i 's,smutil$,smutil-dell,' debian/control
sed -i 's|Depends.*|Depends: ia32-sun-java6-bin|' debian/control
sed -i 's,^smutil,smutil-dell,' debian/changelog
sed -i 's,^Architecture: i386,Architecture: amd64,' debian/control

• Conversion of SMagent.rpm to debian package
  alien -g SMagent.rpm
cd SMagent-10.02.A6.09
sed -i 's,^source,.,' opt/dell/mdstoragemanager/agent/SMagent
sed -i 's,smagent$,smagent-dell,' debian/control
sed -i 's|Depends.*|Depends: ia32-sun-java6-bin|' debian/control
sed -i 's,^smagent,smagent-dell,' debian/changelog
sed -i 's,^Architecture: i386,Architecture: amd64,' debian/control
dpkg-buildpackage -b


With the sed commands above we change the package name to 'package-dell'.  Why?  Incidentally, we are also using IBM DS3400 at work.  To configure them, you also need the same software, but it's branded just a little different.  The software also uses 'source <file>'.  Because Debian comes with the dash shell this won't work.  The scripts say they are using '/bin/sh'. however 'source' builtin is a bashism. Use '.' instead.  We also install the 32bit java of sun because the jar files in Smutil and SMagent depend on 32bit java.  If you only install SMclient you can get away with 'openjdk-6-jre'.  But because there are now native 32bit packages for openjdk-6 on 64bit, you need to install the ones from Oracle.

When you've built the deb package you can just install them with dpkg -i.  To start Smclient do the following

ssh -X root@ /opt/dell/mdstoragemanager/client/SMclient