Dell PowerEdge Virtual Media

[Scott Mitchell]

On Tuesday 08 December 2009 17:41:45 Jeff Blank wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm having a little trouble using the "virtual media" function of
> Dell's PowerEdge R-series (R710 in this case) iDRAC6 under FreeBSD
> (7.1, 8.0).  This is presented as /dev/cd0, a USB/"SCSI" device, I
> guess.  This is in the dmesg buffer when I boot up the existing 7.1
> installation with the virtual optical drive mapped to the 8.0-RELEASE
> amd64 DVD image:
>
> umass0: <Avocent USB Composite Device-1, class 0/0, rev 2.00/0.00, addr 2>
> on uhub6 [...]
> cd0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
> cd0: <iDRAC Virtual CD 0323> Removable CD-ROM SCSI-0 device
> cd0: 40.000MB/s transfers
> cd0: cd present [1058105 x 2048 byte records]
> GEOM_LABEL: Label for provider cd0 is iso9660/FreeBSD_Install.
>
> However,
> # mount -t cd9660 /dev/cd0 /mnt
> mount_cd9660: /dev/cd0: Invalid argument

I see exactly the same problem, also on an R710 (very annoying - I had to walk 
all the way down the corridor to install 8.0 on it :-)

Messing around with it a bit more post-install, I did discover one interesting 
thing:

(501) ~ $ sudo mount_cd9660 -v /dev/cd0 /mnt
Password:
using starting sector 512
mount_cd9660: /dev/cd0: Invalid argument
(502) ~ $ sudo mount_cd9660 -s0v /dev/cd0
(503) ~ $ ls /mnt
8.0-RELEASE/	README.TXT	dev/		packages/	sys@
COPYRIGHT	RELNOTES.HTM	docbook.css	proc/		tmp/
ERRATA.HTM	RELNOTES.TXT	etc/		rescue/		usr/
ERRATA.TXT	bin/		lib/		root/		var/
HARDWARE.HTM	boot/		libexec/	rr_moved/
HARDWARE.TXT	boot.catalog	media/		sbin/
README.HTM	cdrom.inf	mnt/		stand@

So it appears to work if I force the starting sector to be zero.  I see the 
same result with an RHEL5 DVD image:

(504) ~ $ sudo umount /mnt
(505) ~ $ sudo mount_cd9660 -v /dev/cd0 /mnt
using starting sector 512
mount_cd9660: /dev/cd0: Invalid argument
(506) ~ $ sudo mount_cd9660 -s0 /dev/cd0 /mnt
(507) ~ $ ls /mnt
Cluster/			RELEASE-NOTES-U2-de.html
ClusterStorage/			RELEASE-NOTES-U2-en.html
EULA				RELEASE-NOTES-U2-es.html
GPL				RELEASE-NOTES-U2-fr.html
README-as.html			RELEASE-NOTES-U2-gu.html
README-bn.html			RELEASE-NOTES-U2-hi.html
README-de.html			RELEASE-NOTES-U2-it.html
README-en			RELEASE-NOTES-U2-ja.html
[...]
RELEASE-NOTES-U1-ta.html	Server/
RELEASE-NOTES-U1-te.html	TRANS.TBL
RELEASE-NOTES-U1-zh_CN.html	VT/
RELEASE-NOTES-U1-zh_TW.html	eula.en_US
RELEASE-NOTES-U2-as.html	images/
RELEASE-NOTES-U2-bn.html	isolinux/
(508) ~ $ sudo umount /mnt

Also the same result with a CD (as opposed to DVD) image.

I've no idea if the problem lies in the virtual media driver or in FreeBSD, 
but maybe someone who understands these things would like to investigate?  
This machine is going into production in a couple of weeks time.  I can run 
reasonable experiments on it until then, time permitting.

Thanks,

	Scott