Firmware aside, 3ware splits its application into two parts — its command line tool tw_cli and its web management tool 3dm2. While tw_cli is perfectly fine for managing the array directly, you’ll need 3dm2 to setup mail notifications and scheduled maintenance.

3ware's 3dm2 is where most of your card management will be done, as the CLI is sadly limited.

Until version 9.5.3 was released at the end of November, 3ware’s tools simply didn’t install in Ubuntu 64-bit thanks to a broken installer. To get things working, you needed a third party release.

3ware’s install is simply weird; rather than simply provide a .deb file, once you’ve extracted the .tar.gz “Linux” bundle you’re presented with a .bin file. After making it executable, and running it:

chmod +x setupLinux_x64.bin
sudo ./setupLinux_x64.bin

A Java runtime environment extracts, and, shock — a graphical version of Installshield loads. Who said it was just for Windows?

Installshield on Linux... who'd have thought?

After going through the process and a restart, the webserver was running on https://127.0.0.1:888 with the default password 3ware and everything was as easy as pie. Complemented with GapcMon, apcupsd, Webmin, Samba, Proftpd and Gadmin-proftpd, I’m now ready to start filling up my file server.