Hello, just receive this computer and planned to install Linux Slackware 12 on it. Two questions:

1) Raid on this machine is hardware and set to RAID 1. How should I install and configure everything in the installation? Do I install everything on /dev/sda1 ? Or do I need to create an array /dev/md0 (or this is only for software RAID?

2) Network card does not seem to work.... module TG3 loads up, but still the card does not work... any idea.

I was away from my machine while writing this, this is why I don't have more details such as dmesg output or uname output.

Thanks for your help

I would disable the hardware raid and use software raid. If you use the hardware raid, you'll be tied to that controller. If you use software raid, the motherboard can melt down and you can still carry (at least 1) of the disks to a new machine and recover.

Use dmesg and lspci to locate information about the network card. You may recompile the kernel to get the specific card you need. My favorite kernel compile reference is here:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-2.6.0-127095/

I don't know what controller you have in there, but if it's the CERC SATA 2S then you should just use software RAID..

See Dells Linux RAID Support page for more details. The SATA controllers are at the bottom of the page.

Unfortunately the Dell Specs page for the system you mentioned, doesn't tell me enough about the controller to offer any other opinion. How about a lspci output so we can see what the controller is ?

If it's a true hardware RAID controller then I would opt to take advantage of the controller based RAID.
If it's a host based RAID controller then it's pretty much useless from a performance perspective.

If the raid is done via the motherboard, then it is 99.99999999999999992% chance it is fake raid and not true hardware raid.

Keith

Quite a few Dell Servers have integrated hardware RAID (PERC/CERC).. so having a hardware base RAID controller on a high end Dell workstation wouldn't surprise me.

For typical consumer motherboards/systems I would agree with you, almost ALL of the integrated units are fake/hostbased RAID.

Yeah, it was FAKERAID... So I decided to use mdadm and create software RAID, which is fine with me also.

To answer to my second question:
The network card was a TG3 card, but the interface would not come up because of udev. Since I was migrating everything from another machine, I did not erease the content of 75-network.rules and this file was already configured with an eth0 in it. Deleting this entry (which was not valid anymore) and reloading udev did the trick.

Thanks for your time on this one.

I would say the case is closed.

Claude