JMicron JMB36x RAID Status Monitor

I recently worked on a project that requires scheduled status monitoring of a RAID1 (mirrored) volume facilitated via the inexpensive JMicron JMB36x chipset.

To my disbelief, JMicron's xRaidSetup (the facility to create RAID volumes) does not have the ability to report RAID status via email notification which other brands such as Marvell do (I believe Silicon Image as well). So, I had to do it the hard way - reverse engineer xRaidSetup.exe and painstakingly via dis-assembly figure out what it does to get a RAID volume's status (all I wanted to know was if it's running normally!).

I've created xRaidChecker (download) for those who needed the same feature. It's a console application that returns a number indicating the RAID status of the first RAID volume (currently only supports one volume).

Return value of 1 indicates volume is running normally. Any other values indicate an 'Abnormal' status according to xRaidSetup.exe. I'm convinced, however, that there must be specific values that indicate statuses such as 'Rebuild Required' and 'Rebuilding'. If you encounter a return value other than 1, do find out what it means and let me know.

p.s. xRaidChecker needs to be run in elevated command prompt (run as Administrator), or, as I've got it set up, via Task Scheduler running with System privileges and sending out email notifications via a batch file.

p.p.s. JMicron's xRaidSetup must already be installed and your RAID volume set up before you run xRaidChecker (it uses xRaidAPI.dll).

Building ICU (ICU4C) on Cygwin

Now that MCP relies on ICU 50 for its String class (and likely other globalization related classes in the future), we need to build and install ICU first in order to get MCP to compile on Cygwin.

For some reason, the default build instructions does not work. Make will error out (-f pkgdataMakefile is unrecognized by /bin/sh). The problem is with ICU's runConfigureICU script which doesn't properly configure compiler / linker / make flags for Cygwin. Worse, if you follow the instructions and ran runConfigureICU Cygwin, there will be more errors you'll have to deal with.

This is what I had to do instead:
runConfigureICU Linux
export MAKE=make

Notice the first line after you run runConfigureICU Linux. It exports CC, CXX, CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS appropriately. The runConfigureICU Cygwin version however does not. All that the former was missing was a MAKE export. Once you've done that, you can go ahead and make.