Best OS for an old PE2550?

[Marios Pittas]

You could download CentOS 4.5 Final. That's where
I stopped with some old 2450s and 6450s. Perc
RAID should be recognised by the distro (mine was
and its older).

HOWEVER, in my experience, its the SCSI
backplanes that you should be wary of. Those
servers that I had, were probably not as
"cottoned treated" as I treat my servers :( I had
two backplane failures, to the point that I
decided to give up on using the backplanes -
whenj I inquired, DELL Singapore indicated that
they do not stock them - servers too old, DELL
USA does stock them according to the information
on the hardware support forum :(

If you have such "good luck as me", you could
take out the backplane and fit a SCSI cable
directlty to the drives (no RAID after that) -
remember that your SCSI cable must be terminated
if it suports more than one drive.

Alternatively you could look for a PCI-SATA/EIDE
card, however, attractive as this might be, be
warned that it might not be recognised by the
distro (mine had a VIA chip in it, sadly no luck
even though the distro could identify the chip).

-- Marios

--- Jose-Marcio Martins da Cruz
<Jose-Marcio.Martins at ensmp.fr> wrote:

> Brian Hughes wrote:
> > New guy here,
> 
> ...
> 
> > 
> > But about the PE2550s, we'd like to use one
> of these for a light-duty  
> > webserver, the other for a training test-bed
> for networking and such  
> > for students.  We'd like to run the usual for
> the webserver, PHP,  
> > Apache, MySQL, etc.
> > 
> > My question is what is the best and latest OS
> that will run on these  
> > units?
> > 
> >  From looking at the docs at Dell and
> searching through these lists  
> > an older version of Red Hat Linux would be
> good but I'm not sure how  
> > new.  Should I consider the Enterprise server
> versions or stick with  
> > the older RH Linux 9?
> > 
> > It looks like Windows Server 2003 would work,
> that would make the  
> > campus IT guys happy, obvious blasphemy on a
> linux list and I'd  
> > prefer a *nix variant anyway.  I've seen
> mention of Fedora, SuSE, etc  
> > but it looks like there are more issues
> and/or workarounds required,  
> > is that right?
> 
> Did you considered running FreeBSD on these
> machines ? It's muuuuuuuch 
> lighter than Linux. As long you'll probably not
> depending on Dell 
> support, FreeBSD is a good choice.
> 
> A second choice is Solaris 10. It runs fine on
> 2550. But you'll need 
> to disable hardware RAID (on the bios), and use
> SVM to make software 
> RAID, if needed.
> 
> With both OSs (FreeBSD and Solaris), you'll get
> much more performance 
> than Linux, mainly with threaded applications,
> which seems to be your 
> case. Also, you don't need to look for old
> releases of FreeBSD and 
> Solaris - the last ones will run fine.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> José-Marcio
> 
> -- 
>  
>
---------------------------------------------------------------
>   Jose Marcio MARTINS DA CRUZ
>   Ecole des Mines de Paris             
> http://j-chkmail.ensmp.fr
>   60, bd Saint Michel               
> http://www.ensmp.fr/~martins
>   75272 - PARIS CEDEX 06     
> mailto:Jose-Marcio.Martins at ensmp.fr
> 
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