... if you're a masochist.

I recently purchased a second Compaq Proliant DL360 server from my job. The DL360 is a fairly decent server for what I paid for it ($50). Sure, it's a P3, but for my needs, it's more than enough processing power to host my web server.

It's sibling, my first DL360, had Windows 2003 Server installed on it. And it runs extremely well; with Active Directory enabled, it only takes about a minute and a half to finish booting, which is damn good for AD. However, I'm very partial to Linux for web servers and such (Apache, PHP, MySQL, and SVN, along with SSH and SFTP), so for this one, I decided to install Linux.

Let me just say that, three days later, it feels like I've been sodomized with the server. Linux is very good, and the last machine that I installed it on went flawlessly. Support for the DL360, however, has been nothing short of a nightmare, stemming mostly from an issue in certain kernel versions relating to Compaq's "Smart Array" card.

Fedora 7: The first thing I tried was my trusty copy of Fedora 7, which is what I was running on a custom built computer (which was my previous web server, but, since it's the only server in my arsenal with SATA support, it's getting turned into a file server running Windows). This didn't work so well. You might get it to install, if you add "noprobe noapic noacpi" to the kernel options, but it's hit and miss.

Xubuntu 7.04: This one was recommended to me by one of my friends. It also failed decidedly more horribly than Fedora. At least with Fedora, I could typically get it installed all the way. With Xubuntu, it randomly decided that it thought that half the base install packages were corrupt. Again, you might be able to get it to run with "sym53c8xx.blacklist=yes sym53c8xx_2.blacklist=yes" tacked onto the kernel options. (for reference, the sym53 drivers are what conflicts with the cpqarray driver, and blacklisting them seems to work 99% of the time).

Ubuntu 7.10: Just stab me by now? This one had the same problems as the previous incarnation. It pretty much felt like it would randomly pick packages and go: "No, I don't like you, you're now corrupt." On three or four burns of the ISO. However, in the end I did get it to fully install. Once. With almost no packages installed. Considering Ubuntu's structure is somewhat different than Fedora's, I finally went to...

Fedora 8: Hallelujah. It sorta kinda worked maybe. Alright, I digress. The first time I tried it, it installed flawlessly (if you ignore the brain fart I had at first, when I got the x86_64 kernel instead of the i386 kernel - it was late, I had already wasted most of my weekend, shut up).

Then I started installing things, and decided to try out this tool called ISPConfig. Nifty little control panel that brings control of your web, mail, ftp, and dns services together under one easy to use interface. In the end, though, I decided that it wasn't what I wanted, and, since it had already changed a bunch of configuration files for all the different services, I decided that just reinstalling Fedora would be easiest. I mean... it went perfect the first time, what could possibly happen?

Well, it turns out that many things can happen. At this point, I'm waiting for the installer to just tell me to give up. You see, since the DL360 doesn't have a DVD drive, I have to install via a minimal boot CD - meaning it has to download pretty much every package it wants to install. And my internet will randomly drop out at the moment (hopefully getting that fixed tomorrow). Well... if the internet drops out when it's getting a package... it decides that it doesn't need to try again, proceeds, and later tells me that said package is either missing or corrupt, and that I should turn around, bend over, and take it, because the entire install is now, in a nutshell, screwed.

At this moment, I'm on my third attempt to get this working again. I have high hopes for this one. I'm using a different mirror. And various talismans to ward off evil.

As an aside: If anybody reading this happens to also be trying to install things on a Proliant server, and you need help, I'm more than willing to offer what limited experience I have with the beasts. Because, "it's not safe to go alone". >.<



Completely unrelated to my issues with the server is the fact that, for the past two weeks, I haven't gotten much of a chance to talk to Shawn. It's starting to really piss me off, because the only times I do get to talk to him, he's been something of an ass. I mean, I understand that he's got his own shit going on and all, but... *shrug* After a while, you get tired of being kicked under the porch, yo.