[K12OSN] Woe is me: Onboard SCSI/RAID Controller

[Brian Chase]

Debbie,

First, let me say, G'day mate!  Probably more appropriate to an Aussie
bloke, but just feels good to use the slang that I used while living in
Sydney for a number of years.  I miss it.  I'm in Florida now, so after
these hurricanes, it's just now coming into some really good weather.

More to the point, you should put some thought into your server
selection.  What I mean by this is that you should plan your
solution/outcome, then take steps to meet those requirements.  It sounds
like you went off and bought a motherboard and now that you've found it
doesn't support a particular version of Redhat, you're completely
willing to change your original plan.  Not a good idea.

First of all, I would NOT give up on LTSP with this new motherboard. 
The software is available free for download....

        ftp://k12linux.mesd.k12.or.us/pub/K12LTSP/4.1.1/iso/

so you can try at no additional expense and if it doesn't work, my
suggestion would be to relegate this hardware to some other function.  I
have had very few failures on loading linux on intel platforms, and when
I did have troubles, it seems other distributions supported the hardware
better.  Post again if you run into trouble here, and we'll pitch in to
suggest alternatives if required.

I've recently built an LTSP server and recommend you go with the TYAN
Thunder K8S Pro (S2882) with dual Opteron 240's with 4G RAM and it works
well, and the on board SCSI & SATA RAID works great as well, so I'm not
so sure I agree with your previous advisor.

        http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8spro.html

Word of advice, decide your server OS before narrowing down to hardware
platform.

Feel free to contact me offlist if you want more assistance and/or
detail.

Brian Chase







On Tue, 2004-10-12 at 03:38, Debbie Schiel wrote:
> My school bought its first server over the holidays.
> The advice was to get one that did *not* have an onboard scsi/raid.
> 
> Our brand new server, however, is an Acer Altos G700 with an onboard 
> Adaptec AIC-7902W SCSI/RAID controller...
> 
> It comes with an A4 sheet saying "... AIC-7902W... is not supported 
> under Red Hat 8.0"
> 
> It's still "in the box" and I was hoping to set up K12LTSP on our new 
> server over the weekend. (I've been playing quite successfully with K12 
> on an old PIII and on my Dell laptop too.)
> 
> What's the advice/general opinion?
> Am I saying goodbye to K12ltsp and hello to windows 2003?
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Debbie
> 
> P.S.
> I'm a web designer turned teacher, so please forgive me when I say that 
> I have no idea what a SCSI/RAID controller is.