[clue-tech] New Hardware - week2

[Jack Parker]

Erik and I went offline with this for a bit - this is a recap note to
report.

Physically the new MB (ASUS A8N5X) is largish - so large that the lower
drive cage sits on top of the memory slots and I had to remove the cage
(leaving four top/back bays and 5 top/front/full size bays).  The SATA
cables are so short that I couldn't populate the very last of the top back
bays and and had to pop on some expander brackets to fit the last SATA into
a front slot.

I wrestled quite a bit with getting it to work.  RH 7.3 didn't see the
onboard NIC (but installed beuatifully).  9 didn't have the SATA_NV driver
and couldn't see the drives.  FC4 and FC5 both came up beautifully -
although neither was happy with the LVM across multiple drives and in both
cases there was a large amount of pilot error in setting up a raid array to
span the 4 drives.  (I deleted the LV, but neglected to wipe out each LV on
each drive).  In each case it would run through the install, but hang on the
boot.  At one point I dropped down to HW RAID, but after that the drives are
still seen as independent drives when you come up - then you have to go down
the rathole of boot time drivers - not pleasant ground for a clueless n00b
like me.

Managed to figure that out Thursday/Friday and got the whole thing up and
running.  I dropped back to FC4, because that is 'certified' to run on this
MB.  Final disk layout is 3 SATAs in a RAID0 and 1 SATA held out as /, swap,
boot and everthing else.  (not comfortable putting critical volumes on the
RAID)

Bonnie reports that the RAID array is 5-12x faster than what I had.  Up to
4x faster than the singleton SATA drive (block i/o 4x, random seek 2x),
although at other tests only slightly better.

Spent all of Saturday getting Oracle to install.  All sorts of fun
downgrading packages, rooting around the net digging up older RPMs - finding
out that I had to also downgrade x so that I could downgrade y.  sigh.  Had
that up and running last night.  Brought over a bunch of data and loaded it
up to try it out.  While I have certainly worked with faster machines (an
E15K for example), this little puppy rocks.  A full table scan on my older
box at 15 min is now coming in at 2.5 minutes.  An indexed join across two
largish tables has gone from 30-odd minutes to 1 min.

I made a strategic error here in installing lots of stuff before putting
Oracle up.  I had lots of fun with packages refusing to downgrade because
some other esoteric thing needed it.

(There has to be a better method than manually trying each rpm and finding
out after the fact that you needed to do xyx.  There should be something out
there that takes teh n00b by the hand and does the whole thing for you.
Thoughts?)

I'm quite happy, this will let me explore things more quickly than before
(perhaps I can go back to having a life).  Had I spent the extra $350 to go
with a Dell, i'd still have been in the same boat.  They do offer some nice
setup disks which take care of some underlying stuff, perhaps it would have
been easier.  I imagine that I'm still diskbound, but the cpu climbs up to
80% - much better balance.

(I am a little perturbed to see that iostat is not there - where the heck
did that go?  Did I fail to install it somehow?  Thought I got just about
everything).

j.