I was having some problems the other day with a 3ware Escalade 8506-8 RAID controller, this problem led me to tw_cli, a program designed to interface on the linux command prompt with the 3ware RAID controller in my remote linux machines. I even found a neat script that someone wrote to help notify you of any drive or RAID problems as they occur on your system.
Follow the directions here:
http://www.debian-unofficial.org/installation.html
I added the following to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://ftp.debian-unofficial.org/debian sarge restricted
Then I ran:
apt-get update apt-get install 3ware-cli-binary
man tw_cli
