After a failed drive on a RAID 5 set, on one of our Dell PowerEdge 2650's we needed a way to view the progress of the RAID controller in the GUI while the replacement drive rebuilt without rebooting the server and using "Ctrl-A" to enter the PERC3/di controller software which is available right after the BIOS post screen, this would kick everyone off and take the server offline.
Dell provides an OpenManage software suite which has a number of tools for updating bios and other system software as well as software that allows you to configure your RAID controller in your OS GUI. The Dell tools are natively built for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or Windows 2000/2003/2008 Server. If you still have an OpenManage subscription for any one of your servers, they'll continue to send you the latest revision of their software for both Linux and Windows platforms, VMWare versions of their software are now also being included, which is very handy, more about this is available here.
Unfortunately, the latest version (6.5.5 as of this writing) will not allow us to configure the PERC3/di controller on a Dell PowereEdge 2650, it's considered obsolete hardware within this software revision. While trying to install the OpenManage 5.5 CD that came with the Dell Server which is now running on CentOS, you may encounter this error as we did;
“Another instance of SUU is already running”
check out their FAQ
as suggested and;
run these commands:
chattr -i /var/log/dell/suu/suu.lck
rm -f /var/log/dell/suu/suu.lck
Which we were able to find from this blog.
Keep in mind the utility is made for Red Hat Linux, so some adjustments need to be made for it to run on CentOS.
Another problem we soon had was that even after the updated utility would launch on CentOS 5.7, the Server Update Utility (version 1.8.0.50) launched it's window, but only ultimately displayed an error that it was missing libstdc++5.so
Installing the Standard C++ Library helped and allowed it to get much further in the process;
yum install libstdc++
However, soon another requirement was needed, grab the Red Hat Compatible C++ Libraries as well, seemed to be the biggest help;
yum search libstdc++
yum install compat-libstdc++33
This should help quiet down the yelling Dell OpenManage does on launch. If you find it just won't shut it's trap about missing some this that, or other, I'd guess you'll be busy the rest of tonight tracking down something else.