Sometimes i find random things out that i wish someone had posted for google to find, here is a page full of them


Supermicro sells a barebones system called the "SUPERMICRO SYS-1016T-M3FB" it uses a Super X8STi-3F motherboard which has a LSI sas1068e controller chip on board connected to a SAS backplane. On the motherboard is a jumper labeled JPS2 labled SR/IT.
If you enable the jumper (the default) it sets it to IT mode. Fedora11 will not see the controller and load the modules. If you manually load the modules you will not see your hdds.
If you disabled the jumper it sets it to SR mode. Fedora11 will see the controller and load the drivers and drives.
Watchout, it seems to detect the dvd drive as /dev/sda (even though it mounts it as /dev/sr0) so your harddrive will be on /dev/sdb. This is quite a PITA for kickstart using folk like myself.
After all this i still failed to get Fedora11 to install. Finally in desperation i hooked the onboard intel sata controller to the sas backplane (since i wasn't actually using sas drives). This "fixed" it.
Note, the machine may boot so fast with the LSI controller disabled that the dvd drive may not have time to "settle" I found that pressing F11 (boot menu) and then witing until the drive stoped flashing before selecting it as the boot device helped