debian on dell distro

[Gordon Henderson]

On Wed, 1 Nov 2006, Rob Munsch wrote:

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> Anyone know where this's got to?
>
> I know Dell lists some Debian images
> http://linux.dell.com/distributions.shtml
> that run, but they're gone; Scott Kveton's 2.4.25 link, frex, is toast.
> Is anyone mirroring this anywhere?
>
> Lastly, has anyone tried lately with a Debian 2.6 on any poweredge with
> a PERC?  I'm probably about to, so i'll let you know of any great
> successes / horrifically funny failures.

Yes, I have one running. 2.6.18, Debian Stable (Sarge). It's a 1950 with 2
x PERC5 controllers. Internal FusionMPT/SAS controller to 2 SATA drives,
external MD1000 array with 15 x 500GB SATA drives. One PERC5 card sees 7
drives, the other 8.

I suspect Etch might "just work" on it. Sarge didn't see the SAS
controller.

> Steve Mickeler's netinst woody image (same page) seems like a good bet.
> Kind of funny considering a large part of the joy of 2.6 was supposed to
> be added hardware support. Ah well...

2.6.18 (at least) supports everything I need to support, however a
standard sarge CD will not install, which doesn't particularly bother me,
as I installed it by removing SATA drive 0, plugging it into another
server I have already running Sarge with what I want installed on it, then
partitioning the drive, copying the right stuff over to it, running lilo
on the drive, then putting it back into the PE and turning it on.

There was a lot of work to do after that to make it see the drives in the
MD1000, but it's as happy as it needs to be now. (And you might well be
using the hardware RAID on the PERC cards which might make it a whole lot
easier for you - I'm not, but using s/w RAID instead.

If you want the gorey details, drop me a line, or just search the archives
here over the past few weeks.

Gordon