Hardware for Linux Kernel 2.6

[Craig White]

On Mon, 2005-01-24 at 20:39 -0600, Brian Fahrlander wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-01-24 at 18:33 -0800, Minnie Lau wrote:
> > Hi!
> >  
> > I am trying to buy a PC (rack mount) to work as a server, and I am
> > planning to install Linux Kernel 2.6 on it.  Does anyone know if the
> > following hardware (if so, what brand name) will work with Linux
> > Kernel 2.6:
> >  
> > 1.  Hard Drive:  SCSI Raid 1
> > 2.  USB 2.0
> > 3.  Video Adapter (what type?)
> > 4.  Network Adapter (what type?)
> > 5.  Processor (what type?)
> 
>     You must be thinking SCO; Linux runs on almost everything.  There
> are pros and cons of various brands, and I'm sure that's the next step
> in this thread, but Linux quit being hardware specific (other than for
> gadgets and laptops) long ago.
> 
>     Personally, I like Adaptech SCSI cards, others like Promise.  Is
> this meant to be a powerful database (where disk accesses are more
> important), web server (where memory and net speed is more important),
> or file server where it's all important?  :>
----
SCSI hard drives in RAID 1 sort of infers hardware raid, which seems to
be more of the LSI and Adaptec territory but hardware support for 2.6
kernel is a bit light at the moment. Officially, few vendors will
support this but that change is on the horizon in SuSE Professional and
RHEL 4.

I tend to try to use RAID 5 instead of RAID 1 for value, performance and
redundancy benefits. Don't know about USB 2 on rack hardware. Video
hardware...does it matter much on a rack mounted server?

Most of these systems come with one and sometimes 2 1G NIC's, either
broadcom or Intel...seem to work.

Processors are what you are looking for in price/performance.

Good luck - if I were you, at this point, I'd still be using 2.4 kernel
for production systems and upgrade when appropriate. I see a number of
people struggling to get things like FC-2 and FC-3 running on poweredge-
linux mail list from dell...and of course, it isn't officially
supported. Even once RHEL-4 is released, it will be interesting to see
which hardware Dell is going to support.

Craig