I'll describe our hardware first and then the problems we've experienced. I work for a local government Council in Victoria, Australia. They mostly use NetWare V5xxx for file and print services. I thought it was time to show these good people how all this could be done for free with Linux.....
Anyway, we built our own whitebox server. The spec is as follows; 2 X Intel PIII 1Ghz 2 GB of EEC Ram Mylex Extreme Raid 2000 - dual channel adapter with 1 Raid1 of 2 X 36GB drives and 1 Raid5 of 4 X 73GB drives. 1 boot partition of 64Mb, ext3, 1 swap partition of 256Mb, 1 root partion of the rest, ext3. All these are on the first Raid drive 1 home partition of 200Gb XFS, which is to support ACLs through Windows NT etc. on the 2nd Raid drive. Intel Server motherboard, not sure which one but one of those ones that has SCSI build in, lan, graphics etc. recent in any case. Intel Gigabit network adapter and disabled the onboard one. HP Ultrium tape drive connected to the onboard LVD port. In essence, it's all good stuff. Installed Mandrake V8.1 vanilla i.e. the downloaded edition (after which we bought the boxed set from a local distributor) and upgraded Samba to V2.2.2 anyway the one that fixes the bugs with Windows 2000 clients. The Samba part is working like a charm, generally I'm quite happy with it. Now for the problems.... 1. You would think that this system would fly! hmmm, disappointing actually, it's slow to load the kernel and the boot process is nothing special. In fact, I get better performance from my PC at home with an IDE drive. Anyway, this isn't a show stopper. 2. Samba performance is not great. It takes too long to connect to your drives etc. Again, at home if flies. BTW - there are no errors recorded, the logs are fine, all works well but simply not as fast as I had hoped/expected/wished..... There is simply no way this box would outperform a Windows 2K installation as Samba.org recently claimed. 3. The first problem was with the installation of Tapeware. This backup software was bundled with the HP tape drive and works quite well since I've used it in the past on a NT system. Probably no reflection on Mandrake but the X version won't run, comes up with library files missing etc, so we simply run the terminal version. Works fine. EXCEPT if we choose verify on the backup, the backup completes and then hangs during the verify process. We're using the latest version of Tapeware so I assume it's not something to do with this product. 4. The second more serious problem was an inexplicable freeze of the entire system. One day, after being up for about 10 days, it simply froze sometime during the night and we found it in that state in the morning. To cut a long story short, there's nothing in the logs or anything to suggest what may have happened. This problem is what worries me most and has stopped me from putting this box into production thus far and is also the reason that I'm experimenting with the Beta releases as the 8.1 release is not stable for us anyway. Done a fair bit of research (even sent mail to Mandrake figuring they would be interested in any business trying to give Linux a go, but no response whatsoever...) and the most interesting bit of info I actually found on the BRU site from the Tolis Group. They simply state that if you're using the V2.4.8 kernel, you're gambling with your SCSI data. Hmmm. Thanks for that. I sleep a lot better now. NOT! Anyway, moving right along. Yesterday (Saturday) I decided to install Beta4, after installing it at home on 2 different machines without any real problems (some but nothing major). Well total disaster for this server at work though. During the installation of the 2nd CD, the system froze completely. Had no choice but reset. Doh!!!! While installing I usually move between the different sessions so I can see what's going on. Could not get any terminal to respond, there was no activity on the system, nothing. Decided to scrap the 8.1 installation and install a fresh copy of Beta4. No luck either. Still hangs on the 2nd CD. If I install just the first CD the installation works fine. If I use both CDs, the installation consistently hangs during the 2nd CD install. So, let's try it with Beta4 and only the first CD. System starts to boot up fine but then tries to mount the root partition and hangs there. After a lot of *ucking around, it would seem to me that (and according to fstab) it's trying to mount /dev/rd/c0d0p3, which returns an error of "directory or file does not exist" or something like that. This is actually a link to /dev/rd/disc0/part3. If I use this instead in fstab, all works fine. I thought for argument sake, I dig out my Beta3 CDs from the trash (yep, I had already turfed them in the bin, thinking I didn't need them anymore) and install these instead of Beta4. Interestingly enough, Beta3 does not hang on the 2nd CD. It installs the whole lot just fine. Still have the problem with having to fix fstab but otherwise this seems fine. So, I will be going into the office today and reinstall Beta3 from scratch and setup the system to run with that for a while and see what happens. In summary my observations: This whole experience has been bitter sweet so far. I tried to convince the IT staff that Linux could easily replace the existing NetWare servers and they wouldn't have to pay for licensing. Tried to convince them how stable Linux really is and that you won't have to reboot as often as they do now with server abends on the NetWare servers (for whatever reason...) Well, it hasn't quite worked out that way. I deliberately choose quality components when building this server. I checked these against the HCL on the Mandrake site. I choose the Mandrake distribution because of the work they had done with Samba & XFS to support ACLs. I didn't want these people to have to compile their own kernels, install a myriad of patches etc. I wanted to use a distribution out of the box that could do the things you would want it to do. Otherwise I would have gone with Redhat as I have far more experience with that distro. Mandrake people! if you want your distribution to be used on a server platform I would suggest that you put a little more effort into testing with server type hardware. Redhat has been quite successful in establishing itself as a reliable, albeit conservative, Linux distribution. They also have fairly good support from the hardware vendors. I guess their image as a server based Linux distribution is as solid as their desktop one. Mandrake at this stage strikes me more as a desktop distro. As far as flamers are concerned, save your breath. I know there is a "server" version of Mandrake etc. but I'm comparing apples with apples here. I've only used the GPLs of both Redhat and Mandrake, not any enhanced or modified versions specific to a platform. Ultimately it's our overall experience which counts here. We've done nothing out of the ordinary and the whole experience has been deflating to say the least. I sincerely hope 8.2 will be a better one, once it goes gold. Cheers, Peter.
