For any distribution, I would suggest you not rely on the installer to do any kind of helpful work on your part when it comes to new or exotic hardware. I have a few years of experience making RAID cards work and it practically always requires manual intervention. Be it to make the array bootable or marry the working configuration with the update scripts. It always requires deep understanding of which driver operates your card, which firmware is loaded and by which script, and what the package post and preinstall scripts will do when said package is upgraded. The best advice I can give is once it works, be sure to backup the entire bootchain, the kernel drivers, startup scripts, firmware and fw loading scripts, everything. Not once the update would make the system unbootable or arrays inavailable.
As for initial startup, I usually go with booting just about any LifeCD that is able to detect the RAID, then unpack the basic set of the desired distro's packages manually into a root directory, then start working on boot sequence, taking notes in the process. It's somewhat more time-consuming, but the advantage is a steady pace of progress towards a working setup, as opposed to taking pot shots in the dark, trying different distros and versions and hoping for a lucky break. If a distro or LiveCD works, take notes of kernel, drivers and RAID configuration, version numbers and loading mechanism, then recreate the same with the distro you want. Distros shipping bad/buggy firmware is definately not something unheard of. On Monday 25 February 2013 07:49:51 Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote: > Hi Linux-IL colleagues, > Last night I installed CentOS 6.3 on an Intel R1000GZ server. > > My intent at first was to install Debian Wheezy, but I was unable to find > information on drivers for Debian that support either the RSTe or ESRT2 > (LSI) configuration of the RAID card. > > So after giving up on Wheezy I tried to install Ubuntu 12.04 desktop. This > distribution detected the RAID in RSTe configuration, but apparently not > correctly since at the end of the installation it was unable to install > grub anywhere. > > It seems that Intel only supports RHEL and Oracle Linux on the R1000GZ > servers, so my third option, which succeeded, was to install CentOS 6.3 > with the BIOS RAID in RSTe configuration. > > The reasoning behind not trying harder to find a solution for Wheezy > is that by using a base OS that supports the board OOTB I will have a > better chance of getting automated notification of updates for the RSTe > drivers and any other proprietary drivers without manual searching. In any > event, I only intend to use the CentOS as a host OS for other mostly > Debian-based OS's. Is this reasoning sound, or am I a wimp for giving up > on Wheezy? In general, would installing the base OS that best fits the > board regardless of other (mostly ideological) considerations be the best > advice to customers, considering the support implications? (I am assuming > that selecting the board for the OS is not, in general, an option.) > > Purim Sameah, > > - yba _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
