Hi Folks,

I'm going to be buying a new box which will be running RH 7.2 or 7.3 for the time being (ability to use later versions depends on other software the box will be hosting). If you have something that's similar to these specs that works, I'd be pleased to hear details on its parts:

Dual processor MB (prefer AMD but not religious about it)
Lot's of RAM (2 GB or more)
SCSI RAID (probably a 0+1 config because lots of space not needed)
CD or DVD burner
Video, Sound, & other fun stuff's not a big deal as it's going to be a rack-mount set-up
Working ZIP drive would be nice as we currently do a lot of backups to ZIP (but we could always burn CD's)

I'm going to be buying 2 of these for my company and they've gotta work or the Windoze faction will make us switch!

Suggestions most appreciated!

Thanx,

John

1) all the MP AMD chipsets, the dual P3 chipsets, the dual Xeon chipsets are all supported. RH 7.2 may be stretching it back a bit far. RH 7.3 is the 2.4.18 kernel, which is close enough to hand upgrade to 2.4.20 without hastle. All the hardware support is in the kernel, and all of the annoying software reliance like for something annoyingly in the darkness like SunONE will still be there.

2) Install or compile for HIGHMEM, no worries.

3) yep, this is a hastle sometimes, but very few manufacturers of these card don't produce linux drivers thanks to Linux's invasion of the server market.

4) IDE, it'll work under SCSI emulation, hands down. SCSI will just work, its just a matter of having an updated set of cd-record utils and its friends, an easy RPM after install.

5) Cool, even though there will be a lot of fun stuff.

6) Backups to ZIP? yikes... Aights, USB 2.0 sucks back in 2.4.18, 1.1 support is fine and of course all the old parrallels work. It'll just register as yet another generic scsi device.

While shopping around, take a look at the SCSI controller onboard (if you want to go that route), or the card's chipset. Luckily they advertise this kind of info instead of letting you sweat it like onboard sound and video and the like. Either post back here or www.google.com/linux for the info, I really doubt you have much to worry about though man.

Cheers,

Finegan

Yeah, we really do use ZIP's for backups. They're a lot quicker than burning to a CD and we rotate them off site (you can fit a lot of them in a safety deposit box!). Now that they hold 750 MB, the CD route doesn't give any size benies either.

Thanks for the info, Finegan!

I have used ATTO, Tekram and Adaptec SCSI controllers without any problems. The only one I set up for RAID was the Adaptec 2940.

Might as well go with SCSI CDROM and CDRW.

Check with the RH hardware compatability list as a starting point.