On 09/28/2015 11:22 AM, Xen wrote:
Yeah, except that my very common chipset is not even supported in Linux ;-).
There;s nothing to stop you using this as a SAN. I've me people who have implemented their network SAN using Windows simply because they are in your situation; the crappy "fake raid' board won't work under UNIX, so they get a "cheap" box with lots of disk slots, a cheap board, run Windows (many seem to still use XP) on it and run nothing but the SAN. They've converted a problem into a solution. Regular readers will now that I make great use of "junk'. I speak of The Closet of Anxieties, the discard box of outdated or broken equipment. This CPU was one a neighbour threw out when he upgraded, this screen was thrown out when it stopped working; I replaced a couple of bad capacitors in the PSU and LO!. I have a bunch of SFF laptops that ran XP but wouldn't upgrade so were thrown out, but run Linux, even 13.1, just fine. One is acting as a MariaDB server under my desk. A few years ago I got a call from a friend; a legal firm was doing a merger and hence much of the support staff was being made redundant, so their computers were being 'junked' for about 3 cents on the dollar. I walked into a office and they were lined up on the floor and looks like headstones in a graveyard. I took a couple of the servers. Good machines for the time. There are lots of opportunities like this. If you're part of the education system you'll find some school boards doing purge-and-update. None of this 'redundant' equipment is serious stuff for a corporate setting; there's no support. The best that could be said is that if you buy on mass you can treat it like toilet paper or the TV in the SCTV opening sequence. one goes bust, throw it out and pull a replacement out of the closet. But if I was in Xen's position with a "fake raid" board that ran only under Windows, THAT I ABSOLUTELY HAD TO USE then I'd put it in one of the spare boxes from the Closet and set up a SAN. But what the heck, I've got enough spare boxes that I could do what Carlos suggests and devote one to software raid under Linux if I wanted. As Carlos says, the SAN/RAID isn't doing anything else but RAID processing and being SAN it isn't on my workstation so isn't dragging me down. It strikes me as an interesting learning project, but I can't imagine what I'd do with all that space. If I were in a corporate setting I could budget for/buy a commercial SAN box and perhaps it would have RAID internally for reliability. Corporate economics and accounting is very different from home/hobby. its pretty clear from what Xen writes that he's not taking that into account. -- A: Yes. > Q: Are you sure? >> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. >>> Q: Why is top posting frowned upon? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org