Building Microserver Nas with Debian 6 - part1

After my Microserver with FreeNAS 8 crashed without chance of recovery I decided to build a Debian server and fileserver from scratch.

The hardware specs are:

• Hp Microserver N36L with 8GB Ram (Corsair XMS3) [will use both the ram slots on the motherboard]
• Boot from USB pen (Kingston Data Traveller G3 8GB) [will use the one and only internal USB port]
• HP Smart Array P212/ZM, I added 256MB of cache but I don’t have the battery for the cache (BBWC) [will use one Pci-E 8x slot]
• 4x 2TB Drives (2x Hitachi + 2x Seagate) [will use all the 4 drive slots in your microserver]
• optional second NIC connected, I used an HP NC110T [will use 1 Pci-E 1x]

Step 1 – Installing Debian

I simply used the Debian 6 netinstall CD that have both the 32bit and the 64bit installer downloadable HERE
I installed it on the USB pen without problems, keep in mind that having more than 1 drive in your machine force you to select the correct device to install the bootloader (grub), you can read the device from the partitioning tool where you select where to install Debian (in my case /dev/sdb).
I selected the packages “File Server”, “SSH Server” and something like “Common System Tools”.

Step 2 – Create the volume on the RAID Controller

Talking hardware: the HDD cage of your Microserver N36L and N40L will connect nicely to you P212 controller with the provided cable that was connected to the motherboard, I recommend to reroute the SAS cable like I did and suggested in this post: Fitting HP Smartarray P212 in Microserver

When your server boots, in the POST screen, you should see the Raid controller BIOS output, when asked press F8 to enter the controller configuration utility, then create your volume.
I created a RAID 5 volume with 4x 2TB drives.
NB: with the HP Smart Array P212 you’ll need some cache memory (minimum 256MB) to create a RAID 5 array, otherwise you’ll be forced to have only RAID 0,1,or 10 volumes and a maximum of 2 volumes.
WARNING: to improve drastically your performances you have to Enable the Cache, which is done automatically by the controller if you have the battery (BBWC) connected. Since I didn’t have a BBWC i decided to override this setting:

1. Reboot the server.
2. During POST, press the F8 key.
3. Select Cache Settings and press the Enter key.
4. Select Enable Write-Cache Battery Override and press the Enter key.
5. Press the F8 key, followed by the Enter key to continue.
6. Press the Esc key to exit.
7. Be warned that this is a very dangerous setting since in case of power loss you might corrupt the volumes managed by the controller.

I will follow this post with the Part 2 as soon as it’s ready!

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