15 minutes later, one of our loaner Dell PowerEdge 2850 servers came back to the roost, so I even had a server to test the new toy with. A few bits of office furniture also chose to show up on Friday, so the office was a bit chaotic for a while. The rest of Friday is a bit of a blur, mostly from the disk array not behaving itself (or me doing things wrong, but I was following the instructions). It was sort of working, but the agent software kept causing errors in the SCSI driver under Linux, and the HBA BIOS tools complained of SCSI errors too. It should have tipped me off that the HBA tools saw more than 10 hard drives inside of the array, but hindsight is always 20/20 or better.

Skip over Saturday – I spent a few hours in Birmingham at the Home Show. Wasn’t bad, but wasn’t the most useful.

Sunday morning, I was at work for 7 A.M., full of energy and ready to conquer the disk array. Bad move, it conquered me for the next few hours. After spending ~4 hours getting an installation of Windows 2000 loaded properly (primarily rebooting because each install of the IBM management software or other patches requires a reboot – and each reboot took 5 – 10 minutes due to driver issues), and getting all the drivers sorted out, we were able to talk to the disk array. In-band management worked once we found out that Windows had loaded the wrong version of the HBA driver – well, the fault isn’t really Windows, the driver CD for the HBA was outdated, and wouldn’t work with the software that shipped with the unit. Must complain to IBM about that.