Hi,
Whats' the best motherboard you ever ran CentOS on?
--------- Don't read this unless you have lots o' spare time, and please, no flamers or kook-jobs with wierd attitudes, this is just plain old hardware as it relates to centos talk -no politic or mean folks.
Background (why I ask about centos-friendly hardware):
As I order alot of servers, I have alot of vendors telling me all sorts of stuff. It gets pretty extreme sometimes. I play poker each Sat. eve with a Google Engineer, but we never talk about work. One day we might, but I thought i'd ask the list, because there are alot of vendors out there who contradict just about everything I see on the list that I consider to be excellent advice, given by really talented and positive-minded folks, true professionals.
One thing I remember reading about Google is that they choose commodity hardware and engineer the $%^&* out of it and basically add it into a hive/clusterlike existence where it metes out it's daily java/mail/database/ftp/memcache sessions. The modular nature of the hardware allows both scaling, and spontaneuous disaster recovery of very high quality. http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5875433.html
I have chosen to follow the same logic, or at least continue down the path of those before me that made this choice.
From my view, my CentOS machines that never break, run happiest on AMD-friendly boards, with older onboard Broadcomm GBnics that support NIC bonding and handle excess internet & internal snmp (cacti & nagios) traffic without blowing up.
I can rave about Crucial (Micron) RAM, and AMD Opteron CPU's, and Seagate & Fujitsu SCSI SCA 80 pin drives, Chenbro 2U rackmount 6* SCA cases, Zippy redundant power supplies, LSI Logic MegaRAID 320-2 controllers -but the basis of it all is the board. It's got all the other parts no one talks about. It's the source of many a dmesg output. With the right board, life is much much easier.
Right now I run using Tyan S288@UG3NR-D Dual Core Opteron SCSI SATA GBe LAN boards.
I have a vendor that consistently says they get complaints on Tyan boards, but out of the cluster, none of mine have ever died. The Dells die, and get replaced. The remaining Sun's, seem to never die even though I wish they would. Not that i'm a fan of Tyan, -but oddly enough this particular board works great.
I noticed alot of the hardware advice Johnny gives (hardware & advice/fixes) just so happens to coincide with vendors saying the exact oppposite thing. They say go with ATI and broadcomm right when he's actually helping someone fix something related to one of those components. Sometimes on the same day.
If we as engineers are to have any say in our industry, it's going to happen when we all talk outside the box of BS theory and FUD or over-analysis or analysis-for-analysis'-sake.
Right now Intel has things such that it's actually a little difficult to find a stock 2U production linux system unless you actually break it down part-by-part and vet the whole thing. Just curious about your opinions and advice -is there a spec you follow that you like?
Way back when, you'd either order a Supermicro-type system, or get a VA Linux type machine. What do you do now? If you happen to be trying to spec out a solid Linux server, I can say that the spec I arrived at handles over 100,000,000 page views a week -that's 1/3rd of CNET. It's all CentOS, the whole thing. A percentage of you might have travelled across them, especially if you happen to read news on the web.
Commodity is the way to go. Get 40 servers for the price of one commercial vendor machine. CentOS is very real my friends -let's talk hardware! Maybe we can help the centos project out by doing so.
I have to say, i'm sticking with my own hardware choices, -so please don't view this as someone trying to get a hardware spec for free -the intention here is to solidify our own base as centos users, sysadmins.
-krb