[ale] Installing RH onto a IBM PC Server 704

[Jeff Hubbs]

John -

I would go forward with the standard Gentoo kernel and revisit the issue
once you've got the whole system emerged.  I have had to utilize
alternate kernels because the ones supplied with Gentoo would not work. 
In that case, it was a one-CPU box and the supplied 2.4.20 kernel would
not work but a vanilla 2.4.21 would.  

It may be that the supplied SMP kernel image is not urping on account of
its SMP-ness but because of other stuff that isn't even relevant in your
case.  For instance, aren't there boot-prompt options like nousb,
noframebuffer, and other stuff that you won't miss if it's skipped?

- Jeff

On Mon, 2003-10-27 at 16:33, John Cole wrote:
> Howdy!
> 
> I've spent part of today trying different things to get Gentoo to run.  It
> will only run via the normal Gentoo kernel (not SMP).  Can I boot via Gentoo
> then when I run stage 1 define the system as a SMP system?  When I get to a
> prompt in regular Gentoo and run lsmod it sees the AIC-78xx (AIC 7880 is the
> controller inside.
> 
> The disks are 16 4.5GB drives in 2 raid 5 arrays. (8 per an array).
> 
> Thanks,
> John
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeff Hubbs [mailto:hbbs at comcast.net]
> Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2003 9:21 AM
> To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
> Subject: Re: [ale] Installing RH onto a IBM PC Server 704
> 
> 
> If you can't tell by visual inspection, I'd try booting up a Gentoo CD
> to see (via lsmod) what it detects.  
> 
> One thing that's nice about Gentoo is that it gives you an option of
> booting up to an SMP kernel for all that initial heavy lifting
> associated with building gcc and so on.  I'm having fantasies about
> putting "-j5" in make.conf on that thing....
> 
> What does it have for disks?
> 
> - Jeff
> 
> On Thu, 2003-10-16 at 09:10, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> > That sounds like the scsi module is wrong. Try booting from the boot
> > floppy you made during installation. You may need to do some boot line
> > editing to tell the scsi controller some parameters it needs. What scsi
> > controller does this beast have?
> > 
> > On Thu, 2003-10-16 at 09:00, John Cole wrote:
> > > Howdy all!
> > > 
> > > We have an old IBM PC Server 704 that I'm trying to re-use as a linux
> > > server.  It has a Quad PPro-200, 1GB ram, 12 4.3GB drives.  RH 7.3
> installs
> > > just fine.  After it reboots it kernel panics on the SCSI controller.
> It
> > > goes into a loop saying SCSI 0:0:0 does not exist for a few seconds then
> it
> > > kernel panics.
> > > 
> > > Has anyone successfully installed linux (specifically RH) onto this type
> of
> > > machine?  What did you have to do to get it working?  Are there any
> other
> > > distributions of linux that work better on this hardware?
> > > 
> > > Thanks,
> > > John Cole, TICSA
> > > 
> > > Network Administrator / Security
> > > Lockheed Georgia Employees' Federal Credit Union
> > > 430 Commerce Park Drive
> > > Marietta, GA 30060 
> > > (770) 424-0060
> > > (800) 541-8921 
> > > jcole at lgefcu.org
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-- 
Jeff Hubbs <hbbs at comcast.net>