HighPoint RocketRAID

This guide assists with the installation of a RocketRAID card on Gentoo Linux.

Enabling the HPT-RR overlay
The HPT-RR overlay contains the necessary packages to easily install and configure a RocketRAID card.

The preferred method to enable the overlay is through layman. Edit and add the overlay definition:

Next, synchronize the overlays and add the RocketRAID one (which is named RocketRAID):

It is of course also possible to clone the repository for a local overlay:

Building and installing the Linux kernel module
Depending on the hardware card, enable the right USE flag.

Then, install the sys-block/rocketraid package in order to automatically build and install the right kernel module:

Loading the kernel module
Load the newly built kernel module (example for the rr232x module):

Validate that the hardware has been properly detected by reading through the dmesg output close after loading the module:

If the module correctly found the hardware, then make sure that this module is automatically loaded at boot. This can be accomplished by adding it to the file.

Installing supporting software
There are a couple of software packages that provide additional support for the RocketRAID cards.

The sys-block/hptraidconf package provides configuration and monitoring support for the RocketRAID card. It requires a daemon running on the system, provided through the sys-block/hptsvr package. The client itself does not need to be installed on the system that has the RAID card in it.

Deploy the two packages:

Configuration
To run the server, add the right hardware module to :

Now start the server:

To start the server on every system boot, type in:

Administration
To administer the RAID card settings, connect to the server using the hptraidconf command.

The default username is RAID and the default password is hpt.

After a successful login, a prompt will appear through which the administrative tasks can be executed.

All supported commands are documented in the official documentation (.tgz).

Special thanks
Special thanks go to camper2 from ubuntuforums.org who wrote the patches for the kernel modules.