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I bought a refurbished HP Proliant DL380 G7 off of eBay. I run CentOS, and I'd like to know when a drive fails. A friend tells me that the lights on the front probably won't light up since I don't have HP software installed on the server - I have to find out drive status through some utility.

I've seen HP's utilities online, but they seem very large and bulky, and even intrusive. I just want to know my drive status. I don't want to sign up for an HP account. I don't want to receive emails from HP every week. I don't want to install gigabytes worth of software just to see if my drives are running.

Is this possible, or am I at the mercy of HP?

ewwhite
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Ken - Enough about Monica
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3 Answers3

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The drives 100% definitely WILL light up if they fail - regardless of what OS or additional software you've installed. That said I personally wouldn't say that their driver set is too 'bloaty' at all - in fact operating without them would be considered by many professionals as...well...unprofessional.

Chopper3
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10

There's no need to whine about it.

HP provide this level of insight because it is a premium brand. You'll be glad your system has ILO, IML logging and 40+ temperature sensors when you actually need to troubleshoot a problem.

As for simplified monitoring, download the Redhat specific tools by adding HP's Linux repo or seeking out the following individual tools:

  • hpssacli - The CLI RAID control management tool.
  • hponcfg - The CLI ILO management utility.
  • hp-snmp-agents - Needed for email and SNMP support.
  • hp-health - Monitors system health.
Community
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ewwhite
  • 201,205
8

Rather than downloading from HP the fairly large .tgz and .iso files (which can contain numerous additional useful drivers, tools, firmware upgrades etc you don't immediately need) you can configure a repository in yum (also offered for apt btw) on https://downloads.linux.hpe.com/ that allows you to selective install the HP specific management and monitoring tools using your package manager.

More explained here in this Q&A for instance.

Community
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HBruijn
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