on 9-17-2008 1:26 AM Sorin@Gmail spake the following:
Ian Forde <> scribbled on Tuesday, September 16, 2008 8:35 PM:
Our department's planning to buy a refurbished Dell Poweredge 2850 running dual-xeons and with a rather big raid array (8x 146GB).
*My* plan is to install CentOS on this machine and I'd like to hear with you guys if there are any gotchas' doing this.
My main concern is the ability of CentOS to recognize the raid-controller of the Dell and run a raid5-array as well as drivers for the onboard NICs.
Any feedback on this is appreciated.
I don't foresee any problems. I'm running CentOS 5.2 on a 2950 III and omreport installs fine without any problems. I can see the RAID array and monitor via the Nagios omreport plugins (search nagios-exchange for them). Onboard NICs shouldn't be a problem either...
Thx. A former unix-admin at the dept thinks it might be a little on the old side hardware-wise, this particular server is about four years old. I'm split...
This particular Poweredge model is certified for RHEL 2 and 3. If I'd try to install RHEL5 on it, would bad things happen, or is it just a support issue? Seeing how CentOS 5.2 is equivalent to RHEL5, I don't see *what* could happen though... Kernel panics??
They just stopped making that model so they won't re-certify it with newer distros. It will either work or not work, but more than likely it will work. The main gotcha with older hardware and newer distros is if they decide to not port an older piece of hardware anymore like they did with the old megaraid drivers.