Re: Hardware recommendation for collocation
I'll intersperse comments on what I have sitting on my desk in front of
me:
On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 01:42:57AM -0500, Scott Gifford wrote:
> Obviously I need something that is well-supported by Debian. Ideally
> I would like something with hardware drive mirroring (RAID 1), with
> good suppot from within the OS (so I can run a commandline tool to
> manage the RAID and run a cronjob to tell me if anything has gone
> wrong. Hot-swap drives would be very handy, too, again as long as
> they work well under Linux and Debian.
HP NetRaid card uses the MegaRaid driver. I haven't found a command
line tool to manage the array (they exist for SCO unix, Solaris, HP-UX,
but they're closed-source), however the driver puts the status of the
array in /proc/megaraid/hba[x]/. I'm at the beginning of the process of
engineering a monitor program that will alert me to a problem with the
array. The card itself has an audible alarm.
> Also, I've seen that many newer servers offer some kind of "lights-out
> management", a special console available over the network which allows
> manipulating the server before it's booted, including choosing
> alternate boot media, picking which kernel to boot, and toggling the
> power. Has anybody worked with these? Do they work well with Debian,
> and with a Debian client? Are they worthwhile?
My HP NetServer LPr PII/450 has a serial management port that allows me
to access to the power, logs, console redirection, and serial port
passthrough. Its designed to be connected to a modem so that the
management processor can page an operator with a code for what is wrong.
HP makes an add-on card that does the same type of thing over the
network.
> Price is a factor of course, and cheaper is better as long as its
> reliable. Under $1k would be ideal, but that may not be possible with
> the features I'm looking for.
I got the last four I could find: dual PII/450, 1 GB ram, two 72 GB 10K
SCSI hot-swap drives, with the NetRaid card, e100 ethernet. $70 CDN
eBay.
> Beyond that not much matters; any fairly modern server will be fast
> enough.
Perhaps you need to indicate what problems you had (other than lack of
RAID controll or hot-swap) when you used whatever you could find.
> Many of these features are built into motherboards, and it's hard to
> tell whether they will work under Linux from just the documentation.
> I'm hoping in particular for servers that people are already using and
> have good luck with, so the hardware is already known to work.
If you can get your hands on a server before you buy, you could boot
a debian-based live-CD (e.g. grml, Knoppix) and see what is supported.
Even the debian netinst.iso or usb stick hd-media will let you boot and
view the dmesg.
Good luck.
Doug.
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