[Lilug] Ugh, Searching for a New Distro

[Lewis G Rosenthal]

Hi, guys...

On 07/14/15 05:30 pm, Justin Dearing thus wrote :
> Chris,
>
> If its that much if a change to use something not debian based, consider 
> FreeBSD if that supports your hardware. Its not Linux, but its a great 
> unix server OS. Sticking to actual Linux, CentOS 7 is fairly new and might 
> support your HP. If money exists in a budget somewhere, you can also just 
> pay for RHEL and make them figure it out. I would shy against putting 
> Fedora on a server though.
>
I would agree that CentOS 7 is probably the next best choice in this case 
(or RHEL). The nie thing about CentOS is that pretty much whatever works 
under RHEL *should* set up nicely under CentOS (as such things used to do 
under WBEL before CentOS). Fedora is just not "for" this.

(Full disclosure: For Linux, I'm a SuSE guy, coming out of a Novell 
background. That said, as much of the *nix stuff ported to OS/2 has come out 
of Fedora, I've had some wider exposure in recent years.)

I was also of the belief that the latest OSS RAID driver for HP would work 
for the B120i, but looking now, I see that I was mistaken (nice going, HP).
> That being said, you just need to make a debian install ISO with a custom 
> kernel with that raid driver, or load that raid driver at startup. I don't 
> think that would be too hard to do if you just "burned" the install ISO to 
> a USB key, booted in rescue mode and then installled the kernel module to 
> the usb drive and edited grub to load that module on startup. Yes its been 
> a decade since I built a kernel from source. but I think google will 
> confirm I'm not crazy here.
>
Well, building kernels from source is not as much fun as it once was 
(particularly for production systems). I've also found upgrading to be more 
complicated, as I've had to remember which system was running a custom 
kernel and would need extra attention so as not to break something - 
particularly something as potentially devastating as a filesystem driver or 
RAID driver.
> Thinking totally out of the box, why not put VMWare ESX or some other 
> hypervisor on the bar metal and make one giant VM with all the resources. 
> Modern hypervisors are really light weight and will abstract all your 
> hardware away, assuming your hypervisor has the preoper raid drivers.
>
This is an option, of course, though not entirely without its own potential 
pitfalls. At least HP provides a certified driver for ESX.

A truly supported option would be RHEL.

Links:

http://h20565.www2.hp.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c03582943-1&sp4ts.oid=3907937
http://h20564.www2.hp.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c03871499
http://h20564.www2.hp.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c03742583
https://access.redhat.com/articles/118133

Good luck, Chris.
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 5:17 PM Christopher Merlo <cmerlo441 at gmail.com 
> <mailto:cmerlo441 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     My hope for an awesome day, installing Debian on a brand new server,
>     was dashed by a proprietary HP RAID driver:
>     http://askubuntu.com/questions/498133/how-to-install-ubuntu-14-04-on-hp-dynamic-smart-array-b120i-logical-drive
>     (It looks like I can add a driver after I've installed Ubuntu to my
>     unrecognized logical drive?  Not sure how this helps.
>     https://launchpad.net/~hp-iss-team/+archive/ubuntu/hp-storage?field.series_filter=trusty
>     <https://launchpad.net/%7Ehp-iss-team/+archive/ubuntu/hp-storage?field.series_filter=trusty>)
>
>     This is the only kind of server I have access to because public
>     education / county purchasing / you'll use HP and like it.  I haven't
>     used a non-Debian-based distro in I don't know how long, but I guess
>     I'm going to start.  So, what do you recommend?
>     -c
>
Cheers

-- 
Lewis
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Lewis G Rosenthal, CNA, CLP, CLE, CWTS, EA
Rosenthal & Rosenthal, LLC                www.2rosenthals.com
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