[geeks] Cool rescue

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Sun, Nov 03, 2002 at 04:43:30PM -0000, Chris Byrne wrote:

> The biggest problem I'm having with the system right now is that for some
> reason I cant get any Linux distro to install on it because the DAC960
> drivers fail to load. I've tried redhat, mandrake, gentoo, and caldera with
> no luck. They all fail whenever they try to init the DAC 960 drivers with a
> failure to load module message. I've updated the firmware on the board
> itself, the cache battery is good, and I've gone through the configs and
> container creation and all is well. NT installs on the thing just fine so I
> know its functioning. Next I'm going to try Suse and Debian. If those don't
> work then I'm going to try a BSD distro. After that, who knows. I'm
> definitely not going to use NT on it if I don't have to.
> 
> If anyone knows of any init parameters or whatnot that I may need to use let
> me know.

Does this machine have a normal scsi controller in it in addition to the
Mylex?  I'd recommend putting a scsi disk on that controller and putting
a minimal linux distro on it of your choice (mine would be debian).
Then work on getting the Mylex working from there.  You might need to
custom compile a kernel to get it to work.  That is what I'd try.  I've
never worked with that card, so I can't be more specific, it's just that
I've found that if hardware doesn't just work with the default distro,
the easiest approach seems to be to get a small install going and work
from there.

> And of course the final issue is, what to do with it. At the moment I'm
> thinking load up the HDD slots (and the external array) with some cheap 18
> or 36 giggers, max out the RAM and I've got a real nice NAS box. The procs
> themselves are a bit slow for real work, but with four of them some of the
> well threaded things might be a good fit as well.

NAS sounds good to me.  It might be a good database server as well.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd