On Sat, 14 Feb 2004, David Liontooth wrote:
I just unpacked a dual opteron storage server with a 3ware 7000-series RAID controller and two sets of three SATA drives. SuSE 9 is installed on /dev/sda2, a 500GB file system. The technicians at Monarch computers adviced me to install the OS on a different drive. (One problem they had is that 3ware hasn't released a controller card driver for SuSE 9 yet.)
Well, the wonderful people at SuSE have included it anyway. It's also a very easy compile, I did the latest version for a Dual Opteron with SLES 8 without having to work for it.
I've added an IDE drive for this purpose, to free up the RAID 5 drives for storage.
Probably a good plan anyway. SCSI for the OS would be better, but it should be fine.
First, will I get a big performance hit on the OS by moving it from the SATA RAID drives to a single IDE drive? There is 2GB RAM.
That really depends on how you use it. I'm assuming this is a processing (number-crunching?) resource. If your applications mainly do their writes to the Raid and not to scratch-areas, tmp-areas or the swap memory area, then you're ok. If you run a large number of parallel writing processes your in trouble anyway, whether writing to the Raid or the OS disk - it's all IDE.
Second, can I install SuSE 9 from loop-mounted DVD disk images, or in some other way directly from hard drives within the existing installation? I don't have a floppy or CD/DVD drive on this unit, though I could plug one in for this purpose.
Just copy it to a local partition, but here you _really_ want a simple disk, not the Raid. For more info, have a look at the "Installation server" part of the AutoYaST documentation: http://www.suse.de/~nashif/autoinstall/9.0/html/x1091.html
How can I boot directly into a text console and not into SuSE's graphics console (I set it to boot to run level 3)? How can I increase the font size at boot?
Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst - vga=normal always makes me happy. Removing all "splash=" options is good, too.
Finally, the kernel isn't supporting my flat screen display -- the text is squashed and unreadable. An old CRT works. (VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage XL (rev 27))
What type of LCD monitor is it? Do you have the specs? Bjørn -- Bjørn Tore Sund Phone: (+47) 555-84894 Stupidity is like a System administrator Fax: (+47) 555-89672 fractal; universal and Math. Department Mobile: (+47) 918 68075 infinitely repetitive. University of Bergen VIP: 81724 teknisk@mi.uib.no Email: bjornts@mi.uib.no http://www.mi.uib.no/