Astek A33606-PCI experiences?

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selulven

n00b
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Mar 13, 2011
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Hi,

I have bought an Astek A33606-PCI and installed it with backplanes into an old cabinet I had lying around. The end goal is to connect the expander to my Areca 1680ix and have it handle all the drives.

However, when I connect everything and start up, the 1680ix sees all 24 PHY's that the Astek has to offer, but sees no drives. The Astek's heartbeat LED is flashing green, and so is the mini-SAS connector LED for the cable that goes to the Areca.

I have made a cable to connect to the RJ11 port for the RS232 management interface, but Astek's documentation is really poor: it doesn't have the serial port settings and the pinout is most likely incorrect. Still, I have a connection now, but all I see is garbage characters.

I've written an application that attempts all possible combinations of serial port settings and dump the output to disk, but none seem to be intelligble.

Anyone have any experiences with the Astek A33606-PCI? Anyone who's connected to the management interface?

Thanks.
 
Hi mwroobel,

I've read that thread already and while it goes a long way in confirming my suspicions, there's no definite conclusion to either question. I've tried to get in touch with mobilenvidia to hear directly with him, but no luck so far.

As a side note, I contacted Astek about this, and they said I need a service agreement and they will charge me to answer questions about the serial port settings and pinout.

So much for customer service, Astek.
 
Well, in the worst case scenario, you may have to reverse engineer the pinouts. Here is a good article on serial port RE, and here is a link to a discussion of some DB9/RJ11 serial pinouts broken down by manufacturer.
 
Update: I got hold of mobilenvidia from the ServeTheHome thread and he verified the pinout. It's correct. However, while the user manual says you will get a TTY (a terminal, in my opinion), mobilenvidia says you have use a tool to communicate. This may explain the garbage bytes I'm seeing -- the protocol may not be for human consumption.

I'll post a new thread on the subject of Astek's firmware tool, as this seems to have disappeared from their website.
 
If that is the case, you may need to get yourself a bus pirate and talk to the jtag or other similar part on the board
 
Hehe, if it actually comes to that, I'll put the hours to more valuable use and buy a new card with the extra income. :)

I tried Supermicro's equivalent firmware tool (both are based on LSI chips), but it said it couldn't talk to the expander. I'll have to re-check the cable and see that there's no interference on it.
 
I was finally able to get the Astek firmware tool from an Astek reseller. For future reference, in case someone else is looking for it, I've made it available here.

The tool made all the difference. The garbage output from the serial cable was a binary protocol like I suspected. With the xutil command line tool from LSI that was included with the Astek firmware tool, I was able to connect to the expander. It turns out my expander had no boot loader on it. xutil helpfully uploaded a new boot loader, and afterwards the Astek tool was able to upload new firmware and the expander is now running smoothly.

The pinout for the RJ11-DB9 cable is definitely wrong in Astek's user manual. The manual says pin 5 to pin 7, but it must be pin 5 to pin 5 like mobilenvidia mentioned at ServeTheHome.
 
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