Author Archive

Dell PowerEdge C6100 SATA Cable Part Numbers

Thursday, May 30th, 2013

I had a hard time finding these so I figured it was worth posting them somewhere so others wouldn’t have to search for as long as I did.

  • HJ6F0 – 4 sata + SGPIO (sff-8485) => mini sas (sff-8087)
  • HYJ6G – 4 sata + SGPIO => mini sas + SGPIO + 2 sata + SGPIO
  • 334VV – 2 SATA + SGPIO => mini sas
  • 6J3R2 – 6 sata cables
  • DV4VY – 3 sata cables
  • 3T15J – 3 sata + SGPIO =>  mini sas

Now why do I care about these cryptic and difficult to find part numbers? I recently purchased a Dell PowerEdge C6100 server with the goal of consolidating my back-end storage and front-facing webservers into a single 2U box. This required retooling which of the 4 units all the hard drives were connected to. The default configuration is to connect three SATA drives per unit, I want to connect six to each of the top two units and will use some more localized storage for the other two.

Work in progress

A work in progress

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Stop the Technet Sales Calls (661-702-2905)

Friday, July 6th, 2012

I maintain a personal technet subscription so I can play with Microsoft software when necessary. My subscription is due to expire at the end of this month and I’ve been receiving phone calls during the day from extremely aggressive salesmen urging me to whip out my credit card and renew on the spot.

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Fixing DRBD “Lower device is already claimed”

Friday, July 29th, 2011

In my adventures with DRBD I recently ran across this error that took me a couple days to resolve:

d(data) 1: Failure: (114) Lower device is already claimed. This usually means it is mounted.

[data] cmd /sbin/drbdsetup 1 disk /dev/sdb /dev/sdb internal –set-defaults –create-device –on-io-error=detach –no-disk-barrier –no-disk-flushes  failed – continuing!

I was a bit confused since the filesystem wasn’t mounted anywhere (mount showed only the system volumes) and there weren’t any other programs using the raw disk.

Creating a filesystem also ran into a similar error:

/dev/sdb is apparently in use by the system; will not make a filesystem here

Obviously this is not just a problem with drbd.

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