On Thu, Jul 13, 2006 at 12:25:12AM -0300, Bruno Buys wrote: > Andrew Sackville-West wrote: > > >okay gang, help me out here. I've got a buddy coming over tomorrow > >with a dell poweredge 830. So, he calls and asks if i have any windows > >server software for his sweet new server for hishouse. I laugh and say > >(as i do every time I talk to him), why don't you put linux on > >it... well, he's finally taken the bait, and tomorrow is the > >day... hopefully new convert on the way... > > > >So, i've googled around a bit and I haven't seen any showstoppers for > >putting debian on this box except maybe the SATA drive support in > >sarge. he claims to only have scsi in the thing, but we'll see. I've > >got both sarge and etch beta2 netinst.iso's ready to go. > > > >my question: are there any gotcha's I haven't seen in my research that > >you all know about that would prevent an easy clean install on a > >poweredge 830? > > > >its got, more or less: > > > >intel p4, 2GB, 2x 187GB scsi drives, integrated XGI XG20 VGA > >controller, unknown integrated gigabit NIC. > > > >I'm mostly concerned about hardware support and mystery devices that > >don't "just work" on this machine. > > > >tia. > > > >A > >
just an update for you folks who responded, and for the archives... this dell poweredge 830 had two 142(?)GB scsi drives on a rebranded LSI MegaRAID card. A little tweaking in the setup of that card gave us one logical volume using both disks (RAID 0, no redundancy). A quick boot into knoppix 4.02 showed that everything was working out of the box there (netcard, disks, etc). Rebooted into Sarge 3.1r2 net install. We setup up one partition at 10GB for /, one at 1GB for a most likely unneeded swap (machine has 2GB installed) and left the rest as an LVM partition. Install went flawlessly with sarge seeing all the hardware just fine. First boot went fine as well. Broadcom integrated gigabit card worked great with tg3 module, megaraid saw the "disk" just fine. We setup LVM and created a couple of lv's, setup samba sharing, webmin and so forth. The result is a REALLY nice home server setup for my friend, and hopefully a debian convert... A couple of interesting points. The bios for this machine includes an "Intall OS Mode" that limits the available memory to 256MB. I don't need to tell you that debian didn't give a rat's as^W^Wbutt about that as we turned it off before the install :). I guess some OS's don't handle things like memory very well... Also, this box was configured to try booting in the following order: cd, floppy, network (PXE), harddrives with a further subset of harddrive boot order: onboard SATA drives and then the scsi controller. Needless to say, this added a lot to the already really long boot sequence... so we fixed that. Of all the debian installs I've done to date (maybe 5, plus 1 ubuntu) this was by far the easiest. It was really a trivial exercise. So... thanks Debian team! A
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