BIOS/PCI lessons
I had been fighting a problem with a new install for several days dealing
with an AdvanSys PCI controller card and some Seagate Hawk drives. The
problem was that short accesses worked fine but large accesses such as
making a filesystem or copying a large amount of data caused the
controller to lock up. After several days of fiddling with controller
configurations, I finally found the answer and it was in my motherboard
BIOS.
In the PCI configuration area, my BIOS had a couple of configuration items
... one was CPU-PCI Burst Write and the other was CPU-PCI Post Write.
Disabling the Post Write option fixed my system.
Just a note, we now have two Debian boxes up at running on the project I
am working on and two more should be operational within a month. While the
heavyweight applications servers will be Solaris on UltraSPARC, our
infrastructure such as mail, paging server, name servers, documentation
web server, etc, will be on Debian PC's.
In this way, we can allocate the big money to the parts of the system that
pay the bills and keep costs down on the overhead infrastructure that does
not generate revenue. The benefit is that it all works so well together.
George Bonser
The Linux "We're never going out of business" sale at an FTP site near you!
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