Im fairly sure that efw is a 32-bit OS, and 4 gigs is the maximum amount it can
address. (in theory) In reality, they actually use somewhat less than 4, unless
they use a technology like PAE which some people think is too slow. This is
true of both Windows and Linux-based 32-bit OSes. So I'm guessing that the
amount of ram isn’t an issue.
One thorn in the side of linux is its lack of driver support for the many, many
brands of raid controllers out there. Some manufacturers provide drivers, but
if they aren’t included in the OS you're trying to use, you'd have to compile
the drivers, etc. and I personally don’t feel it's worth the effort. I buy raid
controllers like 3ware that are known to work with many versions of *nix
because the drivers are included.
In any case, this is probably also not the issue, because the worse that should
happen is that it won't see your controller or the drives attached to it. That
shouldn’t make it crash...
Sometimes, a bios setting is wrong, causing the OS to load into non-standard
areas of memory, or to have problems with ACPI or AHCI, shadow settings for the
video card, and things of that nature. If you or someone has been in the bios
playing with settings, you might try loading fail-safe defaults, if that’s an
option, or just loading the plain defaults.
And if that doesn't help, that leaves you with the other main components of
your server – the 4 cores and the motherboard's chipset. If thats the cause of
the crash, it looks like efw isn’t going to run on that hardware natively.
However, there is one option you might consider. Citrix makes a product called
xenserver, which is a virtual machine OS, something like VMware. They have a
free-to-use version, with only community support, and pay—for versions with
full support. I use the free version, and run efw as a client.
Xenserver has a windows-based client that allows you to backup/copy a client OS
and also import them. So you could have more than one copy of efw running,
along with ant other OS you'd like. I have Windows 2003 Server 64bit running
quite happily alongside linux OSes on the same hardware.
To install efw, you'd give efw 1 or 2 cpus, and say 2 gigs of ram, and
xenserver gives efw standard-looking hardware to run on. If you had two copies
of efw running, you could do things like setting the gateway of some of your
users to one copy, and some of the users to the other, so that you'd have less
of a bottleneck to the internet.
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