john.parnefjord.se Reflections & findings

SANSurfer FC HBA is a tool by Qlogic to manage SAN connections from a server. If you happen to run a Debian box it may be the case that you run it headless. In that case you may run the CLI version of SANSurfer. Unfortunately, quite a lot of vendors just distribute their programs as RPMs not DEBs, and SANSurfer is no exception.

As I can't distribute the program as a Debian package I can at leats show you how I made a package myself to make it easier to install on several machines. In my case these machines are IBM X3950 with Qlogic 2460 HBA cards.

Download SANSurfer CLI, it is found in the end of the table on this page:

http://support.qlogic.com/

1. Alienate the package:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install alien

alien -g scli-1.7.0-12.i386.rpm

2. Move files to new location or they end up wrong, or at least in the directory /${_prefix}.

cd scli-1.7.0
mv debian DEBIAN
mv $\{_prefix\}/opt .
rm -rf $\{_prefix\}

3. If you try to build a package now you will end up with some errors. So start editing the file DEBIAN/control. I entered the following

Package: scli
Version: 1.7.0
Section: admin
Source: scli
Priority: optional
Architecture: i386
Depends:
Maintainer: John Parnefjord
Description: SANsurfer FC CLI Command Line Interface application for configuring QLogic Fibre Channel HBAs. . 
(Deb created by John Parnefjord) 

4. Remove the ${_prefix} from the paths in DEBIAN/conffiles.

5. Build package.

cd ..
dpkg -b scli-1.7.0 scli-1.7.0.deb 

6. If everything works as expected you should be able to start SANSurfer CLI with:

scli

You should now be greeted with this screen: