Debian (sarge) on HP Proliant (DL320/DL360)
Hi,
I'm planning an installation of Debian (sarge) on a HP Proliant DL320 [1]
(with ATA RAID and 2 BroadCom Gbit NICs) as soon as sarge is officially
released (because I guess it is wise to wait?), but i am hesitating because
I've read previous threads in different mailing lists archives that mention
some problems when it comes to installing Debian (woody and sarge) on HP
Proliant servers.
* Need proprietary binary driver from Broadcom to get the NICs to work.
* Similar problems with the IDE-controller ([2]) as with the NICs (?).
* No support/warranty from HP (?), because Debian isn't a supported OS
according to the specifications for Proliant. Also Debian with HP
Extensions isn't available for Proliant (I'll guess it would be good if HP
Extensions was available?).
My main question is if the installation problems have been solved in sarge
since last time it was discussed (about a year ago [3])? Are there less
problems with i.e. DL360 [4] with SCSI RAID instead of IDE RAID (it didn't
seem so a couple of months back according to [5]? Or have some hardware
components/chipsets in newer versions of the Proliant servers been changed
so that there are open source drivers available?
Or should I completly avoid HP Proliant servers if I want an almost
painless installation of Debian (though my options to choose other hardware
than HP Proliant is unfortunately in this case limited)? The last question
because the server will be located at a different location where I am not
able to go and therefore I am paying the datacenter's employees per hour to
do the installation for me. I don't want to be ruined to get Debian (sarge)
to work, but at the same time I don't want to be forced to run i.e. RedHat
or Fedora because I am very happy with being a Debian user.
I haven't found any threads about problems after installation, so I'll
guess it's stable once it is installed? Except for possible future problems
with upgrading kernel (i.e. work with manual tweaking/installation of new
binary drivers, if there will not be any alternate free ones included with
sarge).
Btw, anyone here who have recently installed sarge on a HP Proliant
DL320/DL360?
Links to specifications and some previous talks:
[1] = http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantdl320
[2] = http://lists.debian.org/debian-isp/2004/01/msg00125.html
[3] = http://lists.debian.org/debian-isp/2004/01/msg00103.html
[4] = http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantdl360
[5] = http://lists.debian.org/debian-isp/2004/04/msg00158.html
Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Henrik
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