Hi,

I soon plan to install sarge on a HP Proliant server, but before I choose which HP Proliant model I would like to have some input from those who have experience of such an installation.

The models I can choose between are HP ProLiant DL320 G3 (S-ATA IDE RAID) and HP ProLiant DL360 G4 (U320 SCSI RAID). Perhaps also the DL140 (single IDE disk), but with that one I don't have any disk redundancy at all so it will probably not be the one I'll choose because the last thing I want is loss of data because of a single disk failure.

I don't know if I can wait until the official relase of sarge, so I wonder if it wise to use the latest RC of the debian installer for sarge and the install the latest sarge/testing snapshot or whatever it is called. Or should I wait, because I really don't want an unstable system...?

Currently there is only 88 release critical bugs left to handle with in sarge (according to bugs.debian.org/release-critical) and I guess an apt-get dist-upgrade is all I'll need when the official release of sarge is out to get the same sarge as those who wait to the official release?

Anyone here who have installed sarge/testing on a HP Proliant DL320 G3 or DL360 G4 without any problems at all? I.e. you were able to install a base system of sarge/testing without building your own kernel or do some magic?

No problems with the network card or disk/RAID controllers (S-ATA IDE RAID vs. U320 SCSI RAID)? S-ATA RAID worked fine? Possible to hotswap both S-ATA and RAID disks without problems?

Possible to install boot records on both disks and then remove one of the disks and still be able to boot the thing? Is that by the way the default during the installation on RAID disks or is that something I need to fix manually by myself with help of lilo/grub?

I want Debian, but if it doesn't work well on the HP servers I'll choose between then unfortunately I won't be able to use hardware from HP. But I won't know that before I actually bought the hardware and I don't want to buy it and then be forced to use something else than Debian as OS to be able to use it. Therefore your input is very valuable to me.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

Henrik

i had some problems with sata raid too.
i think it was an ML310 server with a promise fastrak SX4000.
it some month since that and at this time the sarge installer hadnt sata support yet.

because promise had only some precompiled drivers to offer i contacted the promise support and a very nice guy send me a partial source that works on debian 2.4er kernels.

the tricky thing is to get your os on the raid, making a own installer with driversupport is a bit complicated so i did it the easy way.
the ml310 has a normal ATAcontroller too, where i installed the system, then loaded the driver and copied the whole system to the raid.
then i had to rearrange fstab, lilo and initrd to boot from the right disk and load the raiddriver on boot.

works pretty smooth, but i have to report that hot-swap dont work here. i dont know if its a driverproblem, but i think that this controllers dont really support hot-swap at all.


about debian on HP i have to say that HP take much care about the hardware they use.
i encountered nearly no server with hardware that doesnt supported by the linuxkernel.
there a few HPdrivers for linux, but most of them are only alternatives.
Like the driver for the HP smartarray, i never used the HP driver and the orginal linux driver didnt gave me any problems at all.
i even used hpacucli last week to resize my raidarray online and this works 100% OK with the opensource driver.
its a pain in the ass to use binary drivers, because they often depends on special kernelversions and this is always a problem on the next kernelupdate.