Debian "etch" hardware compability list?

[Andrew Reid <reidac@bellatlantic.net>]

  Hi all --

  I regularly buy new machines for a computing cluster we
run, which we try very hard to keep both homogeneous and 
stable.  It's running Debian "etch" amd64 these days.

  Lately, I've been having trouble with some of the
newer commodity mobos that have come with the new nodes.

  I got some Intel DG33BU boards, which initially didn't
recognize their hard drives, but when booted with "pci=nommconf",
eventually did, but then needed a custom e1000 driver for the
on-board ethernet device.  

  I also got some Asus P5GC-MX/1333 boards, and they needed
a custom ethernet driver also, for which, fortunately, source
code was on the provided CD.  

  I also had some trouble with a one-off Asus P5VD2-VM SE
board, that needed a custom sata_via module before it could
see the hard drives.  That one ended up not going in the 
cluster after all.

  But anyways, it seems to me that the bad old days of the
mid-90s, when "know your hardware" was the mantra and the LHCL
was the bible, are sort of coming back again.

   Ideally, what I'd like is a list of motherboards for which
all on-board devices are known to work with the 2.6.18 kernel,
but I'd settle for a list of chipsets, or even a list of SATA
controllers and ethernet devices.

  I've googled around, but I haven't found a nice, compact
source of all the info I want.  Is there such a thing?

				-- A.
-- 
Andrew Reid / reidac@bellatlantic.net