SuperMicro 5015B-MTB & CentOS 5.2

A recent project required that I find a linux solution for the 1U SuperMicro Server (5015B-MTB). The 5015B ships with a SATA Raid controller -

• Intel® ICH9R SATA2 (3 Gbps) controller built-in
• RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 support (Windows Only)
• RAID 0, 1, 10 support (Linux)

that allows you to enable Intel or an Adaptec configuration. I first attempted to install with a Debian Lenny distribution but was not initially able to get the RAID controller working properly. The installation would continue to see 2 separate drives regardless of the setup being a RAID 0 or 1. This led to the CentOS installation.

I started with a CentOS 5.2 Network Boot disk and completed a basic install. I did allow it to install iptables (firewall) and knowing that I would be using Samba, made the appropriate selections when prompted. The installation took approximately an hour to complete. I then installed via "yum" a few additional packages...screen, nmap, samba, lynx, sudo etc.

My main goal was achieved with this installation by having a working hardware RAID solution. Once installed, I did test this by removing one of the hard drives while using the system. There was only a momentary pause and then it returned to normal. I then reinserted the drive and after several minutes removed the other in the same fashion. The result was the same. I am very pleased to have had it pass this aggressive test.

Second on the list was to install VMware 2.0. This was my first install of VMware on CentOS. I downloaded the rpm from vmare.com and installed in the typical fashion.

sudo rpm -i vmware-package.rpm

I then proceeded to configure the application. Based on the installation it appeared to be successful. I however quickly found by running

lynx localhost:8222

that it was not listening on the assigned http port. That then led to some additional testing to determine what ports were actually listening on the box.

netstat -anp | grep 8333

This did not return a response and so I began to research the logs to see what information I could glean.

The logs showed the following.

VMware[init]: /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-

hostd: error while loading
shared libraries: /usr/lib/vmware/vmacore/libvmacore
.so.1.0: cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Permission denied

After some careful googling, I was able to determine that this was a known issue that others had dealt with. I was presented with 2 different solutions but chose to correct it by issuing

chcon -t texrel_shlib_t /usr/lib/vmware/vmacore/

libvmacore.so.1.0

based on http://www.vmware.com/support/server2/doc/releasenotes_vmserver2.html#issues

I then restarted VMware and had a working VM Solution.

While researching this issue, I found several others determined it necessary to make a configuration change to

/etc/SELinux/config
SELinux=permissive

Note: I found this initally set to "enforcing". I later also changed it to "permissive" in order to help troubleshoot a Samba problem.

Update: October 2009

I ordered another one of these servers along with 4 1.5T Seagate drives.  I found that under the Adaptec Raid setting, it only saw 512GB of each drive instead of the full 1.5T.  It was necessary to configure the bios to use the Intel Raid setup in order for Debian (along with the dmraid=true) to recognize the full size of the drives.