On 14 Feb 2007, at 11:41, Mike Williams wrote:
On Wednesday 14 February 2007 11:15, Stroller wrote:
I'm looking to deploy a couple of servers for Gentoo use & I'm
wondering if anyone has any recommendations. There requirements for
each are slightly different, but what is in common is that I want
hotswap SATA hard-drives (a simple mirror RAID is probably fine) &
PSUs.
I'm having a pleasant experience with http://www.boston.co.uk
Supermicro stuff is really good, and cheap (when it comes to pre-
built server
style hardware).
Boston can supply everything and anything Supermicro make.
Yeah, I did look at Supermicro. Might be great for my own server, but
not sure about for my customers - my concern is that Supermicro seem
to be the manufacturer & they have several distributors in each country.
It's not much good if I need a spare (one half of a pair of redundant
PSUs, for instance) in two years time and the supplier says, "sorry,
mate, we don't stock that model any more". Do you know if either
Supermicro or Boston have policies to cover this sort of thing? If I
were deploying several servers I might consider buying one or two
extra for spares, but that's not practicable on this occasion.
This is why I like the thought of Dell, HP or IBM. But I thought I'd
see if anyone here had any recent experience of their Linux support
before I phoned their salesmen to hear how great it is. My Compaq -
admittedly a machine that's 6 or 8 years old, now - has very spotty
Linux support; drivers for the RAID hardware are in the main kernel
tree (which is GREAT!) but the source RPMs available for diagnostic
stuff were a bit of a chore to install on Gentoo and some features
(like fan speed) were only available under Windows. It'd be really
nice to do a little better than that this time around.
What Supermicro systems are you using, please? And how are you
finding the Linux support?
For instance the 7044H-TR has 4 x internal cooling fans & 2 x rear
exhaust fans and the manual (<http://www.supermicro.com/manuals/
superserver/4U/MNL-0775.pdf>, section 7-17) explains that the BIOS
"option is set to "3-pin fan", the fan speed is controlled based upon
the CPU die temperature. ... set to "4-pin", the fan speed will be
controlled by the Thermal Management Settings pre-configured by the
user". I'm not quite clear whether this is entirely managed by the
BIOS or whether it needs o/s / kernel support, too?
Stroller.
--
[email protected] mailing list
