[clue-tech] Linux on a Dell PowerEdge 2300?

[Alex Young]

On Sat, 12 Feb 2005 00:23:23 -0800 (PST), William <bkimball1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> My employer just practically donated an older Dell PowerEdge 2300 server to me.  It has a couple
> things I have to fix before it's usable (one of the SCSI drives is bad and it's missing one of its
> hot-swap drive thingamajigs -- I honestly have no idea what they're called, but they hold the SCSI
> drive such that it can lock into the case and mount onto the SCSI RAID backplate).  After I get
> the hardware issues figured out, I'd like to put Linux on it.  I favor RedHat, but I also need to
> stick to the "free" route.
> 
> When I get the hardware figured out, the system will have 6 drives, 2 CPUs, 2 NICs, and about a
> Gig of ECC RAM.  I'm going to use the machine as a dedicated Apache+TomCat (probably with PHP,
> Perl, and FTP on it, as well) server -- no GUI -- at home.  Can I get Linux and this desired
> configuration onto this box?

Absolutely.     I run a couple of these machines as http and mail
servers, they are rock solid linux machines.
The system firmware that shipped with them is incompatible with most
if not all distros - they will not see the drives.    Get an upgrade
from dell's site and your in business

> 
> Notables:
> 1)  I'm never installed Linux onto multi-CPU boxes.

Just make sure it installs an SMP kernel.

> 2)  I've never dealt with SCSI drives, and know very little about them.

SCSI is easy.    Your partitions will just be sca1, sca2, etc. on the
first drive, scb(x) on the second,  etc.

> 3)  I've never dealt with RAID systems (or hot-swappables, but that seem self-explainatory).

Just decide what RAID level you want.     Likely it's 1 or 5.   
Configure that in the RAID BIOS, and your set.

> 4)  I already have to pay plenty to solve the hardware issues, and I am just a home user, so I
> really can't dump thousands of dollars into Enterprise Linux offerings.

I've had lot's of success with Debian on these boxes.     I'm sure
most distros will work well.

> 5)  I'm tenacious and willing to experiment, if necessary.

Yep, you'll need a good deal of this to do very much with OSS.

> 6)  I have 6 other servers already at home, most of which are RedHat Linux, so I'm not a _total_
> noob; I'm just doing research before potentially wasting a lot of time.

Let me know if you run into problems.   I'll be happy to share config
files as needed.

-Alex