Re: Hardware recommendation for collocation

[Scott Gifford <sgifford@suspectclass.com>]

"Douglas A. Tutty" <dtutty@vianet.ca> writes:

> 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:

[...]

>> 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.

Really those are the big ones.  At various times, I have ended up
with:

  * Network or RAID cards that required special drivers (and so are a
    hassle to deal with during install or upgrade)

  * RAID cards that could not be managed remotely (an error beep is
    not very useful when the server is in somebody else's data center)

  * Hot-swap systems that did not work with Linux (it would not see a
    new drive until it was rebooted--not a very hot swap!)

That's about it.  My experience is that everything else generally
works smoothly.

I was hoping to avoid similar problems with any kind of remote
lights-out management; I'd hate to find out after the fact that the
management platform is not well-supported under debian.

>> 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.

Yeah, that's true.  Maybe I need to just make some educated guesses at
vendors with good return policies and see what I find.  :-)

Thanks!

----Scott.