Bulk Tape Eraser / 486 Linux box problem SCSI

From: Doc <doc_at_mdrconsult.com>
Date: Sat Jun 22 01:12:44 2002

On Sat, 22 Jun 2002, Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:

> As for your problems, first, I would remove all but the required cards
> (drop the sound blaster and token ring). Second, make sure the kernel you
> are booting to do the install has the proper SCSI drivers in it. RedHat is
> pretty good about this, but if I remember my Slackware (way back in '93 or
> '94) you had to select the proper boot disk to match your hardware.

  I'm pretty sure RH 5.2 needed the driver disk (supplemental?) for EISA
bus adapters. Slack, in that era, was the most versatile by far with
weird hardware mixes, mostly _because_ of all those boot floppies.

> I know the later RedHat installations default to something other than
> fdisk, but it is still available if you prefer it (fdisk is an option under
> RedHat 5 and 6, but for later versions I'm not sure, not having installed
> RedHat 6.2 or higher).

  Still there. And Disk Druid, the GUI thingie, is getting worse, not
better.

> Partition 1: 5M mount as /boot
> Partition 2: twice physical ram, swap
> upto 128M max
> Partition 3: rest of disk mount as /
>
> /boot contains the actual kernel and since older BIOSes have problems
> loading past 500M or so, this ensures that the kernel will reside on space
> that the BIOS can see (which lilo uses to load the kernel).

  Slackware puts the kernel in the root directory. I tend to make a
/boot partition anyway, move the kernel there, and reinvent LILO to
match. Kernels >v2.2 will use a swap partition up to 2G. And if he's
serving email, I'd surely put /var on its own partition. Running out of
file blocks on the / partition is a wonder to behold. Running out of
inodes is even worse.

> [3] Why not use my firewall as my colocated server? Um ... well, I got
> the colocated server before I aquired my firewall machine, and
> secondly, the firewall machine is a Compaq, and Compaqs are well ...
> unique ... and are sometimes quite painful to get Linux to run on
> them.

  You can say that again, twice. :^)

        Doc
Received on Sat Jun 22 2002 - 01:12:44 BST