hey guys, i dont post much, but these past two days have been somewhat trying for me. im not a fan of redhat or ibm. i think both are overpriced, bloated, and the support isnt worth it unless you cannot google. but my new boss bought like 10 of them ibms.
anyway four ibm xseries 306 servers. tried installing rhel-3. rhel-4 doesnt work - as in, the install dies saying 'you're trying to install on an unsupported hardware' -- winxp + dmi, anyone? before i did anything else i tried the serverguide thing. it wiped the drives, offered winnt/2k or 'other' in terms of my 'NOS'. no linux anywhere. it showed me a dialog that told me to reboot and install my new NOS. that was that. so the point was to get one machine installed and configured and then use systemimager to replicate to the other four -- ive done it on hundreds and hunderds of machines in the past. not this time. the e1000 driver doesnt work. no network == no systemimager. fine. bent over backwards, injected the driver into the pxe initrd image. now the network works. but the drives arent seen. this took about 8 hours of work, so i decided that i'll just go with kickstart. kickstart should work, right? i have a working pxe server and the cds are copied to the drive already. not. the redhat provided initrd.img [/images/pxeboot] contains an OLD e1000 driver that does not work with the hardware in these damned 306s. ive seen this before, intel would just change the pci id on their nic's and the old drivers dont work anymore. i ended up installing three machines from a cdrom. sucked. there is a solution from ibm, its called rdm and it costs $50. which is kinda scary. $50? thats it?! ghost is more than that..? guys, i ask you to extend your experience and/or advice here. no beatings please, most of us are accomplished professionals. how would you do it? have you done it? should i just pick up a broom and start swiping? [in retrospect, i think i should have explored their manuals more.. even tho the expression i got from it all was 'either the ibm way, or no way at all'.] thank you. yours, gg __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
