Installation report on AMD Duron

["Christopher L. Everett" <ceverett@ceverett.com>]

Thanks for a generally excellent product. I have had production servers using 
Woody up for several months now with no unplanned downtime except for one box 
which experienced multiple kernel panics which I traced to a flaky hard drive 
controller on the mobo.

On these installations, I was training a new assistant who commented favorably
on how much easier dselect was over Red Hat rpm.

Now for the details:

Hardware:

- AOpen AK77 mobo
- AMD Duron 1000 CPU
- 256 ECC PC2100 SDRAM
- Seagate Barracuda 40GB HD
- 3 Intel Pro 100/S Desktop NICs
- ATI XPERT 98 8MB AGP video card

Configuration Notes:

We built 2 of these to be Linux Virtual Server load balancers for an Apache 
cluster using the 2.4.18 bf 2.4 floppies using ReiserFS.  Installed the base 
system  via HTTP.  On reboot set it up with shadow MD5 passwords, skipped 
tasksel and went straight into dselect.

Problems:

1) When I went to initialize and mount partitions from the menu and I
   specified ReiserFS as the filesystem, an error message saying the
   mount failed appeared on the screen.  However, the installer should
   have asked questions relationg to bad block scanning option and the
   ReiserFS -notail mount option and it did not ask these questions.

   I was able to initialize my partitions using the console and the
   mkreiserfs command just fine, and the "Mount a previously initialized
   partition" menu command from the installed worked just fine.

2) /apt/get/sources.list somehow ended up pointing to Debian stable;
   while I was easily able to select multiple distribution mirrors on
   both installations, neither I nor my assistant noticed an obvious way
   to select the distribution we were after.  Our corrective lenses could
   have been dirty though :)

   I worked around this by logging in at the second console with
   Ctrl+Alt+F2, and editing /etc/apt/sources.list with vi.

Post-installation issues:

None.

After installation, I compiled and installed custom kernels on both boxes 
patched with the LIDS, preempt, and LVS patchsets downloaded from Debian
using make-kpkg and dpkg.  No hassles at all here.

I consider these successful installs for now.


--
Christopher L. Everett
Chief Technology Officer
The Medical Banner Exchange
Physicians Employment on the Internet


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