Peter, Charlie, and fellow e-smith'ers, Thanks for the replies, my comments are below... At 09:52 AM 2/8/2001 -0500, you wrote: >On Wed, 7 Feb 2001, Dan B wrote: > > VA Linux makes a distro based off of RedHat 7.0 that they call 7.0.1. It > > just has a few updated drivers, a new kernel, and a few extra > RPMS. One of > > the updated drivers is the new DAC960 driver for those expensive Mylex > Raid > > cards (namely, AcceleRAID 352). Since I need support for this card, I > have > > to use the VALinux distro. However, I also need the functionality that I > > love from e-smith (WINS/DNS/Samba out of the box). How do I reconcile > the two? > >Are you sure the DAC960 driver that ships with e-smith 4.1x doesn't >support this card. I know it supports the Mylex DAC1164 card (that's >what we use on our server and I did a fresh install of 4.1rc4 on it >yesterday and it's working fine. (And it's on VA Linux hardware too). Yes, I'm sure. Unfortunately, it looks like the version included in E-smith 4.1x is the same as RedHat 7.0: DAC960 ver 2.2.5 (built Jan 23 2000, 1 year ago), whereas the newer Mylex Ultra160 cards (such as the AcceleRAID 352) weren't supported until DAC960 ver 2.2.8 (because of a new firmware interface on the new cards). FYI, the newest DAC960 driver version is 2.2.10, available from http://www.dandelion.com/Linux/DAC960.html I have tried opening several RedHat bugs (bugzilla.redhat.com) regarding updating their DAC960 driver in the 6.2 and 7.0 releases (a driver disk would be great), but the answer is always: recompile after install. But how can you install if you can't access your hdd's? They did decide to add the new DAC960 as a Rawhide upgrade to Kudzu kudzu-0.78-1 (E-smith version is kudzu-0.72-3es). http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=18972 (Bugzilla bugs: 18972, 17996, 16816). >PS In a later mail you state that e-smith 4.1x ships with kernel >2.2.18pre11. This is incorrect. We are shipping 2.2.16-22. You were both correct in pointing out that I mixed up my kernel versions. :-) VALinux 7.0.1 ships with 2.2.18pre11. If e-smith did, then it wouldn't have exact binary compatibility with RH7. (But, luckily updating drivers doesn't have to change the kernel version *or* binary compatibility, hint, hint). The updated DAC960 driver was officially rolled into 2.2.17, which RedHat just *barely* missed with their 7.0 release. Now I have some new questions: - Loading VALinux 7.0.1 and applying all of the e-smith RPMS didn't result in a working E-smith install (as I outlined in my last e-mail). What should I try now? - What are the differences between the RedHat kernel-*.rpm files and the E-smith kernel*.rpm files? - What would the process be for building a custom e-smith distro that had a newer kernel (e.g. VALinux kernel-*.rpm files)? - If I begged on my hands and knees would someone look into adding a newer DAC960 driver to e-smith 4.1x? - Is there any plans to try e-smith on RedHat 7.1 Fisher (which does support the newer DAC960)? - Does anyone have any tips for installing e-smith-*.rpms on an existing running RedHat system? - What if I used VALinux 6.2.4 - which is based off Redhat 6.2, could I then load E-smith 4.0.1 with more ease than I could load 4.1x on VA Linux 7.0.1? Thanks again for all the help and correspondence, Dan Browning, Cyclone Computer Systems, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
