Installing on Xserve

[Atro Tossavainen]

Hello,

We recently got an Xserve. I've installed YDL 2.3 from the December ISO
on it.  I've got a few questions I need to ask, and a few suggestions
I'd like to make to the developers.

(My background, just in case anybody needs to know: plenty of Linux
 experience on x86, some earlier non-x86 Linux experience on PPC (Macs
 6100/60 and 7300/166 just for fun) and Alpha, day job Solaris/IRIX/
 Tru64/x86 Linux/HP-UX admin.)

I want to get ReiserFS to work on Xserve, but I seem unable to.  Maybe
it's due to the endianness issues briefly touched upon in

<URL:http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/support/installation/guide.shtml#notes>

? However, Reiserfs folks claim that ReiserFS will work on any platform
that supports Linux, <URL:http://www.reiserfs.org/faq.html#non-i386>.

I've compiled my own kernel from Ben's 2.4 development tree on
penguinppc.org (which I needed to do anyway to get the Ethernets working
properly), and I've compiled the ReiserFS userland tools, both 3.x.0j
which I am accustomed to using on both x86 and Alpha Linux.  Trying to
mkreiserfs just keeps printing out the usage instructions regardless of
whatever parameters I give.  The partitions I'm trying to create a
Reiser filesystem on are quite valid and will happily accept an ext2
filesystem, and my parameters are correct, of course.  I also tried
compiling the latest 3.6.4 userland tools package, but the build fails
with pages full of PPC specific errors.  How do I get ReiserFS to work?

----

That's the "why aren't things working?" part.  Then here's the suggestions...

Offering either ext3 or reiserfs right there in the install would be a
Big Plus.  ext2 on drives this size is a *p*a*i*n*.

I got our Xserve with dual hard drives so that I could use Linux' soft-
ware RAID to mirror the root partition and use the remaining space as a
large fast striped scratch space.  The installation procedure does not
seem to offer the possibility to create any sort of RAID.  Maybe in the
future?  It can be done by hand after the install, but is there a reason
why it couldn't be right there in the install?

When, during the initial install, I created partitions on both /dev/hde
(1st drive) and /dev/hdg (2nd) with the intention of setting up the
mirroring later, YDL install decided to put the bootstrap HFS partition
on /dev/hdg.  The machine boots from /dev/hde, of course, which left me
with an unusable install.  Maybe the install procedure should just ask
the user where to put it if the automatic guess can't get it right?

So I restarted install from the CD.  The install is smart enough to
notice that YDL was already set up and proceeded to ask "Package XYZ...
is already installed, skip it?".  This is really good.

However, the time it took me to hit Enter a bazillion times (the number
of packages already installed, which was quite large since I had picked
the "Everything" option) was probably longer than if I had just zapped
the disk and redone the install.  A "Skip all" button would be nice!

Regarding
<URL:http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/support/hardware/breakdown/hpc.shtml>

> **** At this time we do not support the Xserve's external ethernet card. 

Wonder why?  Support for Broadcom Tigon3 (external Ethernet) in the
standard 2.4.20 kernel is quite complete.  It would work out of the box
if it weren't for the fact that Apple decided to give their card a
different PCI ID from the standard one - that isn't recognized by the
driver.  All that's needed is to let the driver recognize this new ID. 
The (very simple) changes are there in BenH's 2.4 ppc development tree.

What's not mentioned on the same page is that even the mainboard Ether-
net is not fully supported in the 2.4.20-0.7b kernel.  If it's hooked up
to a gigabit switch, it will go completely autistic.  BenH's 2.4.20
development tree has a fix for this, too.

-- 
Atro Tossavainen (Mr.)               / The Institute of Biotechnology at
Systems Analyst, Techno-Amish &     / the University of Helsinki, Finland,
+358-9-19158939  UNIX Dinosaur     / employs me, but my opinions are my own.
< URL : http : / / www . iki . fi / atro . tossavainen / >

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