I've inherited a DL360 G4p with W2K3 already installed on it.  Of course, that's got to go.  This particular machine is the SCSI model with HP's Smart Array 6i RAID controller.    I would far prefer to install Debian Etch on this rather than a RHEL4 derivative.  However, I'm thoroughly confused by HP's prolific, yet abysmally written documentation.

Does anyone have any tips on where I could start with this?  Are any of HP's supplied drivers necessary or are existing Debian drivers adequate?  I've already read the posts on the HPasm rpm2deb converter.  Will this script install all of the necessary HP utilities?  Will I need to build a custom kernel to support their RAID controller, or anything else for that matter?  Does all of this work with the AMD64 version of Etch?

Sorry for all of the questions, some of which may be a bit boneheaded, but I haven't had any experience with HP's servers and after reading through the HP "Library of Congress", I'm a bit fried.

Alright, fair enough.  I was just a bit worried and uncertain if there was going to be a ton of work to do before I could get this machine up & running.  And I have plenty of experience building my own kernels and end up doing so often, so I'm not worried about that.


No, these are Xeons from what I understand, not Itaniums.  Double-checking HP's site...yeah, they are.  Unless I'm missing something....