When problems related the DDP raid cards occur, updating the drivers might not always be enough.
Updating the Areca firmware is sometimes needed when the raid controller does not behave as expected.
You can achieve this by going into the Areca web interface available after clicking on the “Areca” icon of the DDP interface.
After the Areca interface appears, login as root (the default password is 0000).
Then go to the “Upgrade Firmware” entry under the “System Controls” menu as shown in the screenshot below:
You can then download from this page the latest firmware package for your Areca card model.
After extracting the archive, you will notice that there are actually 4 binary files that need to be uploaded.
From the Areca interface, you need to upload them one by one:
- Browse to one of the file
- Click the “Confirm The Operation” checkbox
- Click on the “Submit” button
Once the upload has completed, a confirmation message will appear. You can then upload the other files following the same procedure.
After all the files have been uploaded, you need to reboot the DDP so that the Areca raid card take the new firmware into account.
For redundant configurations:
The DDP failover is relying on the Areca raid cards ability to see each other, among other things.
Hence, it is best practise to make the firmware upgrade procedure independently on the DDP heads, when only one DDP head is powered on at the same time.
Raids cards which are not running the same FW version may encounter difficulties to communicate each other and start causing problems on the failover system.
Under certain circumstances where both heads are powered on and you are on the middle of a FW update, both heads can become active on the SAS bus start corrupting the DDP volumes.
This is the reason why when updating the raid cards FW of one DDP head, it is highly recommended to make sure that the other one is completely powered off.
After uploading the latest Areca FW to the master head and rebooting it, you can check whether the update has completed properly and if all volumes can be mounted without problem.
Then you can switch off the master head and follow the same procedure for the remaining head.
This will give you an extra security as you can make sure that all raid cards have the same FW version running on both heads, before eventually getting them back online at the same time so that the failover can be triggered in case of problems.