Monthly Archives: May 2013

Ubuntu: HP Smart Array Controller Status

Posted by on May 30, 2013 No comments

The HP Smart Array Controller series which can be found in most HP Servers today is supported by the Linux Kernel driver hpsa. The utility hpacucli helps to communicate with the Controller. But this utility flaws native 3.x Kernel support in Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Penguin). The command ctrl all show doesn’t show any controllers:

=> ctrl all show

Error: No controllers detected.

The command setarch helps to work around this by causing the programm to see a kernel version number beginning with 2.6:

sudo setarch x86_64 --uname-2.6 hpacucli
=> ctrl all show

Smart Array P410i in Slot 0 (Embedded) (sn: 500xxxxxx)

See also Ubuntu Bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/890768.

Flash BeagleBone Black using Linux

Posted by on May 4, 2013 No comments
BeagleBone Black

BeagleBone Black

Today I received my BeagleBone Black! For 45$ you get more power and even HDMI. There is also a serial debug port now on a distinct header connected to UART0 of the CPU. The user can connect to this serial port with a TTL converter (like the FTDI-USB-Cables) and a terminal emulator. Set the baudrate of 115200 and you should be able to see U-Boot, the boot process and a login prompt in the end. Everything worked fine, except when I tried to connect using SSH it failed with an error:

$ ssh 192.168.7.2
ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host

I could no figure out how to resolve this on the currently running firmware so I followed a tip on the mailing list to just upgrade the firmware. On linux this is normally a fairly easy process, one has just to decompress the image and pipe it to a SD-Card.

unxz --stdout BBB-eMMC-flasher-2013.04.13-DDR3-400MHz.img.xz | dd of=/dev/mmcblk0

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