CERC ATA100 & Linux 2.6 Kernels..

[Robert Goley]

I have not heard of any good fixes for this.  These machines are kernel locked 
until someone is willing to port the old driver to the newer kernels.  I have 
not heard of any willing for a small device that was avoided by many.  I have 
a couple in the field also running Debian Sarge.  The only thing I can 
recommend if you must continue using the hardware as is would be to strip the 
base install to the kernel only.  They you can install the current debian 
version to a subdirectory and run all services from that subdirectory using 
chroot.  Debian has many facilities for doing this.  This is how many of 
their builds are done.  I have done this to release a server that can run 
both sarge 32 bit and Etch 64 bit software without trouble.  It is not the 
prettiest solution but neither is this particular hardware.  It would provide 
you with updated userland software with support from security.debian.org and 
with hardware support for the legacy controller.  Anyway, my 2 cents....

Robert

On Tuesday 04 March 2008 19:40, Matthew Barr wrote:
> I've been searching on & off for a few years about this.  I've got a
> PE 600SC (IIRC, it's in Colo) with the CERC ATA100 card..  Support was
> dropped in the 2.6 kernel a while back, and I never was able to make
> the jump from Debian Sarge -> Etch or newer, or Centos 4  etc.
>
>
> With the rather impending doom of support ending for Sarge, I need to
> come up with a plan to get this host onto a newer OS.  The drives that
> are attached are, IIRC, 3 80 gig drives.
>
> I'm seeing some old traffic about a firmware downgrade maybe fixing
> the problem (from 6.67 -> 6.61) and some possibility that recent
> code / patches might have fixed the problem in either -mm Kernel
> patches or in 2.6.20.
>
>
> Anyone able to comment?
>
> (I've also found http://www.humbug.info/?p=123 , which is a Centos 5
> case)
>
> I'd like to stick w/ Debian, since i've gotten everything working
> there as it is.  I'm hoping to do an inplace upgrade of the packages,
> and not take the server down for an extended period of time.
>
>
> Matthew
>
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