I recently bought an IBM x335 server off ebay to make the step into "big boys Linux league", and have since then run into a plethora of unexpected challenges I previously had no prior knowledge even existed.

Having just recently overcome the issue of not being able to connect a normal keyboard and video out, I'm now in the process of getting Linux to work.

The main challenge is that I have nothing to compare against. I believe the throughput of the SCSI disks is slow, but I cannot know for sure without comparison.

For example, "hdparm -t /dev/sda" shows a disk read of only 3.12MB/second - while my old laptop shows 35MB/sec - so there's clearly something wrong somewhere...

I would like to upgrade the LSILogic SCSI firmware BIOS from LSIlogic's web page to take advantage of recent stability fixes in recent kernels, but since it's not listed on IBMs x335 web page, I dare not in fear of breaking this complex beast of a server.

So - my real question - does anyone here have experience on how to make such a server run Linux?

Problems so far:

1. How to upgrade BIOS and SCSI BIOS without breakage
2. Random kernel panic's on tg3 (Ethernet) input on 2.6.18.8
3. How to interact with server internal health monitoring from Linux and not just BIOS/POST
4. some kernel configuration insight on RAID settings
5. Performance comparisons on harddisk and CPU speed

I'm now on Slackware 11 running kernel 2.6.18.8

Is there anyone else out there with experience from similar systems who can either point me to a more appropriate forum, or offer some kind insight into this next step of mine?

Thanks much in advance

Edit: Spelling...

-Y1