Bug#255138: Installation report for TC1 on Dell PowerEdge 2650 (99% Flawless!)
Package: installation-reports
I just got this new server, a Dell PE 2650 in at work, and before I let
this ship sail, I thought it might be nice to try some various
installation methods on it, with d-i TC1.
Some info about the server: It is actually supported by Woody with
bf2.4. It's got a PERC scsi controller, which is handled by aacraid.
This particular machine is configured in a 2/3 split backplane,
mirror/raid5. These are shown as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb respectively.
Since it's a Dell, /dev/sda1 already exists to contain diagnostics and
such. I'll be leaving this alone, as I find them useful.
First, I tried using the built in management card's floppy booter, to
test a fully remote installation via the management card, but it didn't
work out -- It can only be used for booting, not switching floppies
after booting. Well, _maybe_ that would work in an OS that used the BIOS
to access the floppy, but not Linux. I don't know about this, but I
would be interested to hear any possible workaround not involving
physical contact with the server. I was just sort of curious to see if
it would work.
Second, I burned and booted the TC1 netinst iso sarge_d-i/i386/tc1
/sarge-i386-netinst.iso with linux26 debian-installer/framebuffer=false
It booted fine, the installer started okay, but during the hardware
detection, I got 2 spurious errors while running 'modprobe -v aic7xxx'.
One during CD-ROM detection, the other during network hardware
detection. This happens under 2.4 and 2.6.
During network hardware detection, with linux26, it failed to detect the
network adapter. 2.4 didn't fail, and detected both "BROADCOM
Corporation NetXtreme BCM5703X Gigabit Ethernet" adapters, using what I
think is the 'tg3' driver.
Partitioning, installing base from the CD, and installing grub went
perfectly. The CD ejected. I used ext3 for my root filesystem, and xfs
on everything else. Grub booted the system. Base-config was entirely
successful. Very nice job, folks.
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