Installing on Xserve

[Dan Burcaw]

> 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*.

The current installation routine doesn't give us much flexibility to
offer this out of box.  This  is one of the reasons our next release
will feature a different installer offering ext3 right from install.

> 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?

Again, same issue as above.

> 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?

Same issue as above. 


> > **** 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.

The version of the driver in our first Xserve iso did not work on ppc. 
In 2.4.20 it does now work and all of our current kernels do enable this
card.  I'm not sure if this is enabled in the December ISO. 

> 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.

We sync our kernels with benh quite frequently to pick up changes such
as this.