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