[clue-tech] New Hardware - week2

[David L. Anselmi]

Jack Parker wrote:
> 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.

Seems like a Dell might have been worth it.

> 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.

I've been places where people tried to keep old software running on new 
hardware.  Seems like open source doesn't work that way--you can have 
all the drivers and bug fixes you want but only in a current release 
(that's upstream, not the distro people).  I think that's a good thing, 
but it throws some people.

> 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.

Well, this isn't a simple project so you'd expect to do some learning. 
Boot drivers though, if your kernel has it then boot time autodetcting 
should work (initrd works well IME).  I'm surprised FC4 didn't want to 
play, unless you needed a newer kernel.

> 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)

If you had good backups it wouldn't matter where the critical volume 
was.  You do have backups, right?

[...]
> 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?)

Aptitude is what you need.  It might not downgrade things easily but it 
will easily remove things.  Beats the heck out of RPM tools.  And 
snapshot.debian.net looks like it makes downgrades pretty easy too.

Dave