Re: Why are company's not certifying Debian?

[Alvin Oga <aoga@ns.Linux-Consulting.com>]

hi ya

On Sat, 30 Oct 2004, Rishi wrote:

> > the server you buy, is herein "blessed/certified to work with debian"
> >         - see the incompatibility list as what was previously
> >         posted for what is known NOT to work
> 
> joking apart. :-) .. really what I meant was once I tried to install
> Debian Woody on an HP server and it was unable to do so ... meaning...
> it did not have the SCSI controller driver to install the OS on the
> HDD. However, with Red Hat, I was able to download an RPM which
> contained the SCSI drivers for it load at startup.

now we're getting somewhere

scsi ...  not all installers know how to handle scsi drive properly
	- its the distro installer's kernel problem, that it has to
	install the scsi driver for the scsi controller you have
	( and usually the problem of the person doing the installing )

everything reasonable works ... you just have to fiddle with this and
tweek that and fumble/grumble about foo widgets to get it all working

in all hardware issues: ( onboard or pci cards )
	- how fast can the cpu be, what speed FSB, how much L2 cache
	- how much memory, what kind, what speed
	- you need to know which IDE chipset it uses
	- you need to know which NIC chipset it uses
	- you need to know which SVGA chipset it uses
	- you need to know which sound chipset it uses 
	( unless you dont care about sound )

don't buy ANY hardware untill you can answer those 6 basic questions

or that the vendor says that it will guarantee that xxx-OS
will work on foo hardware combination

> In the same way right now I was hoping to buy this server and use the
> built in features like Hardware RAID and Mobile / pager notification
> when disk fails.

i know people that ran a $40K/month pager bill because of being paged

- why the !@#$% do you want to be paged ...
	- the hardware should NEVER die within reason ...
	( it's okay for it to die of old age at 3 yrs or 5 yrs later...)

with 2 disk ... what's the point of hw raid ???
	- the machine has to come down ... if you are using ide disks

	- the machine should stay down, until the new replacement disk
	is sync'd ... and that can be a whole day ...for a full 200GB
	disks

- if you cannot be down for more than 5 minutes... you should have 2
  complete independent systems ( properly configured and tested for
  high-availability ... ) which has NOTHING to do with raid or mirror'ing
	- if you cannot afford the extra hardware and extra time
	to configure, than that extra hw costs should be
	realistically weighed agaist how much $$$ is lost due to
	the machine failure

c ya
alvin