Best OS for an old PE2550?

[Mark Watts]

> New guy here,
>
> I'm a broadcast engineer at Napa Valley College; supporting the
> broadcast engineering program.  We've just received a few PowerEdge
> 2550s, dual Pentium III 1GHz 1GB with PERC 3/Di controller.  We get a
> lot of donations, some useful, some not so much.  We also received
> about 1.5 TB of fibre channel storage in the form of many SGI
> PowerVault (Clariion FC5400) units, just wish I knew what to do with
> them.
>
> 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?
>
> Do I need to run/use OMSA?  From an earlier post it looks like I'd
> need version 4.5 or earlier, will 4.5 work?  Anything else I should
> know or read up on to make these useful to a cash-starved college
> program?
>
> Now about those fibre channel raids, any chance, with the right HBA,
> that the PE2550s will be able to manage and use them?

I'm running Mandriva 2007.1 on them with no issues.

Mark.

-- 
Mark Watts BSc RHCE MBCS
Senior Systems Engineer
QinetiQ Trusted Information Management
Trusted Solutions and Services Group
GPG Key: http://keyserver.veridis.com:11371/search?q=0x455420ED
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