I'll intersperse comments on what I have sitting on my desk in front of me:
On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 01:42:57AM -0500, Scott Gifford wrote: > Obviously I need something that is well-supported by Debian. Ideally > I would like something with hardware drive mirroring (RAID 1), with > good suppot from within the OS (so I can run a commandline tool to > manage the RAID and run a cronjob to tell me if anything has gone > wrong. Hot-swap drives would be very handy, too, again as long as > they work well under Linux and Debian. HP NetRaid card uses the MegaRaid driver. I haven't found a command line tool to manage the array (they exist for SCO unix, Solaris, HP-UX, but they're closed-source), however the driver puts the status of the array in /proc/megaraid/hba[x]/. I'm at the beginning of the process of engineering a monitor program that will alert me to a problem with the array. The card itself has an audible alarm. > Also, I've seen that many newer servers offer some kind of "lights-out > management", a special console available over the network which allows > manipulating the server before it's booted, including choosing > alternate boot media, picking which kernel to boot, and toggling the > power. Has anybody worked with these? Do they work well with Debian, > and with a Debian client? Are they worthwhile? My HP NetServer LPr PII/450 has a serial management port that allows me to access to the power, logs, console redirection, and serial port passthrough. Its designed to be connected to a modem so that the management processor can page an operator with a code for what is wrong. HP makes an add-on card that does the same type of thing over the network. > Price is a factor of course, and cheaper is better as long as its > reliable. Under $1k would be ideal, but that may not be possible with > the features I'm looking for. I got the last four I could find: dual PII/450, 1 GB ram, two 72 GB 10K SCSI hot-swap drives, with the NetRaid card, e100 ethernet. $70 CDN eBay. > Beyond that not much matters; any fairly modern server will be fast > enough. Perhaps you need to indicate what problems you had (other than lack of RAID controll or hot-swap) when you used whatever you could find. > Many of these features are built into motherboards, and it's hard to > tell whether they will work under Linux from just the documentation. > I'm hoping in particular for servers that people are already using and > have good luck with, so the hardware is already known to work. If you can get your hands on a server before you buy, you could boot a debian-based live-CD (e.g. grml, Knoppix) and see what is supported. Even the debian netinst.iso or usb stick hd-media will let you boot and view the dmesg. Good luck. Doug. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
