On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 10:45 AM, Wes Will <[email protected]> wrote:

> New member. Greetings.  Tried sending before but apparently the MailMan
> decided I was "unclean" or something.  Trying again.
>
> I was gifted with a 6850, full boat of CPUs and five 15K disks in the
> array.  Other than adding RAM and maybe some more disk space, all in
> perfect working order and quite a nice box.  Using it to replace
> something seriously old and probably moribund.
>

8G is VERY old, more than 10 years old in fact. That's double the expected
lifetime of a PE machine. Those CPUs and disks are slow and power
consuming, and a modern i5 desktop (a cheap optiplex) can do a better job,
while being under warranty. The amount of space consumed and the noise of
those beasts is also quite a factor. I'm sure you understand all that, but
I still want to lay it out because looking at that huge box usually makes
us techies drool nonetheless.

I've worked at Dell when 8G was just starting to get phased out by 9G and
10G was under development, so I've dealt with a lot of these beasts, and
quite frankly, they never were anyone's favourites even when they were
still new and their EOL was far ahead down the road. If you have the
option, stick to something 9G or newer, the introduction of SAS made a huge
difference there, and the CPUs are much more adequate to the virtualization
loads as well as much less power consuming (core2 tech vs pentium tech -
mainly a leap in power consumption/heat generation than speed).


>
> Question is, for a general-purpose LAMP server, what is the
> most-likely-to-work FOSS distro of Linux for this particular box?  Not
> wanting to start a distro war here, but I need something I can count on
> to handle the hardware.  Newer distros (such as LEAP) seem to have
> serious issues with things, network adapters in particular.  (That idiot
> pushing "SYSTEMD" should be tossed out on his ear...)
>

I've used RHEL6 of these machines when there were still relevant with no
problems, just make sure you get all the firmware (especially the disks and
PERC) up to date. I don't see why RHEL7 shouldn't work, but I haven't tried
it myself.


>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> --
> Wes Will
>
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