[CentOS] Best Board Your Ever Ran CentOS On?

Thu Jan 25 18:59:17 UTC 2007
Benjamin Smith <lists at benjamindsmith.com>

My $0.02 
On Tuesday 16 January 2007 17:12, Karl R. Balsmeier wrote:
> Whats' the best motherboard you ever ran CentOS on?
> Right now I run using Tyan S288 at UG3NR-D Dual Core Opteron SCSI SATA GBe 
> LAN boards.

I have half a dozen systems with very, very similar hardware. Under EXTREME 
loads (LA > 70) it STILL NEVER DIES. I love these things! 

> 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.

Ditto. Just tried some quad-core Supermicro systems, and they've never been 
able to hold their own with a sustained load above 8 or so. And these are 
QUAD CORE systems... 

> 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.

Salesman will say whatever if it means a sale. 

> 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? 

Why 2U? I'm *all* 1U. 

> 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'm setting up a cluster of (minimally) 6 systems over the next year. 

> 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.

Tyan is the way to go! 

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-- 
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
- XEROX PARC slogan, circa 1978