[DRBD-user] Re: heartbeat 2.0.8: lockups kerneloops

Gerry Reno greno at verizon.net
Sun Feb 25 20:31:23 CET 2007

Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.


Ross S. W. Walker wrote:
> Yes, well 2.6.9 doesn't have the well honed plug-and-pray hal system
> that the later distros have. It means you will have to manually kick off
> kudzu or some other older plug-and-pray method to get new hardware
> recognized, or know what driver it is that needs to be installed.
>
> I personally use the manufacturer's latest linux drivers, I don't care
> about kernel GPL taint just want the best performance from my hardware,
> so normally I replace the kernel versions with the manufacturer's
> latest. CentOS helps because most manufacturers directly support RHEL4
> which means their drivers will just work as-is 90% of the time.
>
> I try to avoid CompUSA or Staples hardware as it is mostly designed for
> consumer use and doesn't have the enterprise level performance
> characteristics that I like to deploy on my servers.
>
> Of course if it were a desktop deployment then Fedora or Ubuntu would
> work out fine, that is where all the fancy bells and whistles help.
>
> -Ross
>
>   
We were concerned about upgradability and that's why we didn't want to 
use manufacturers tarred up drivers. The reason we felt that FC6 would 
work out long term was because we already had some boxes with FC5 on 
them that we had upgraded to FC6 (yes upgraded - no fresh install) with 
no problems and these boxes are working fine. The FC6 upgrade worked 
because I had taken the advice of someone who told me that if I made 
sure to only install software using the packager and did not install any 
software outside of the package manager say via tarballs, etc. that 
upgrading FC would work. And they were right. All the upgrades worked 
perfectly. So this has become our strategy, to only install via the 
packager and when FC releases a new version we should be able to upgrade 
without much/any difficulty and in this way we can keep hardware support 
for our systems very current. Now we've only done this through one 
release so when FC7 is out and looks stable enough we will do this again 
and then I'll see if this strategy really looks valid long term.
Yes, I agree that places like CompUSA and Staples mostly have consumer 
level hardware but sometimes that is all that is needed even in a 
server. For our servers I've set them up with pretty much vanilla 
hardware, I just buy the cheap video cards - after all I'm not playing 
games on these boxes so lots of fancy graphics aren't necessary; the 
gigabit nic cards - I've bought both the server versions and the client 
versions and after testing found there was very little real difference. 
You have to tweak and tweak to get jumbo frames to do anything 
significant and really I just don't have the time for all that so the 
client versions have been working just fine; I do use usb-flash rescue 
boot disks and usb external dvd and hard drives and FC6 works great with 
these. For network gear, SATA/PATA/SCSI hard drives and power supplies I 
order these online mainly because I can never seem to find what we need 
locally - usually the ATX PS leads are too short for any rackmount case. 
Some of our servers are using ATX PS in the rackmounts but you have to 
check and get the real long leads. But everything else, I just buy local 
and after all that's the point of Linux - to run on commodity hardware.
I like CentOS and I think it will be much better once they get to 
version 5 which will be based on RHEL5 which itself is based on FC6. And 
that would work for us. We just needed to get a jump start to get to the 
newer kernels and udev and hotplug support sooner and that part for us 
has been great.

Gerry




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