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

[Les Bell]

Brian Chase <networkr0 at cfl.rr.com> wrote:

>>
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.
<<

In all fairness to Debbie, she probably saw some Acer Altos blurb that said
"supports Red Hat Linux, supports SuSE Linux", etc. I got caught the same
way - bought a couple of Acer Altos G301 servers for a school, on the
understanding that Red Hat 7.3 and 8.0 were supported (and 9 shouldn't be a
problem, you'd think) - only to find out that the on-board RAID controller
was a MegaIDE chipset that only has precompiled binary drivers and only
supports the kernel supplied on the RH 7.3 and 8.0 CD-ROMs. If you want to
download and use a later official RH kernel, as a bug fix or security
patch, tough - you're out of luck. Acer tech support were less than helpful
- they had shipped a driver and as far as they were concerned, that was
Linux support and if I didn't like it, I knew what I could do. . .  .

Out of interest, I've tried Googling for info on the AIC-7902W, with no
success, I've looked and searched on the Adaptec web site (nothing under
7902 and Adaptec seem to have renumbered all their products since I last
used them), and I've even grepped the 2.4.20-28.7 and 2.6.7 kernel source
code. Only the last gave any joy - the generic aic7xxx driver does have
support for some versions of the AIC7902, but perhaps not the W (wide?)
version.

Debbie: I'd go ahead and try a test install of any recent version of
K12LTSP or Red Hat/Fedora and just see how far you get. We might all be
panicking needlessly. . .

(But I'd still give those sneaky buggers at Acer a serve. They make nice,
good value gear, but they just haven't got a clue about Linux - and that's
going to cost them, and rightly so, imho).

Best,

--- Les Bell, RHCE, CISSP
[http://www.lesbell.com.au]