I've recently got a hold of an old server which is a dual celeron 533. Just wondering if anyone could help me out (or point me to a guide) that will help me unleash the second cpu, i think it involves messing with the kernel which i have never done.

As for the dhcpd question, i was just wondering how you go about telling it to assign ips from different pools on different interfaces eg eth1 192.168.1.20-30, eth2 192.168.1.50-60 etc.

Thanks

[edit] slack 10.1 is installed on it btw[/edit]

Usually the installer these days are smart enough to install a right kernel for your daul processors machine (At least in Fedora the installer always get it right)

Try and see if the kernel version has "smp" in the name or not. If yes, the kernel can already take advantage of the dual CPU.

Linux dub 2.4.29 #6 Thu Jan 20 16:30:37 PST 2005 i686 unknown unknown GNU/Linux

when i do a cat /proc/cpuinfo it only has one cpu:

root@dub:/usr/src/linux-2.4.29# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 6
model name : Celeron (Mendocino)
stepping : 5
cpu MHz : 534.555
cache size : 128 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr
bogomips : 1064.96


Thanks for you help

OK. Since I am not using your distro, so I draw my experience form Fedora. i.e. they may well be Fedora specific

If a smp-enabled kernel is not installed by default, I can download a smp-enabled kernel package form the RPMS depository. For exampe,
this rpm
Then use rpm to install it. A new kernel is now available for selection at boot time in grub (the boot loader)


So, in your case, it should be similar, but you may use apt instead of rpm and lilo instead of grub.

Slackware does not come with a kernel that has SMP configured by default. You will have to recompile the kernel and enable the SMP option.

ahwkong that unfortunatly won't be that easy in Slackware since it doesn't uses/like RPM or DEB packages, and I think that compiling a kernel from source would be the best alternative for him (also, I think that there are not smp-enabled precompiled kernels for Slackware).

Compiling your own kernel is not hard. The option you need is: Processor type and features-> Symmetric multi-processing support (this is on the 2.6.5 kernel; it should be very similar on other kernel versions).

I haven't done much kernel compiling, and am not a good reference yet. I can tell that it is not nearly as scary as I thought it would be. In choosing kernel options, I prefer the "make menuconfig" command. There are plenty of good instructions on how to do this, so I won't bother giving you any bad ones

Alright, thanks for your help on this. I haven't compiled a kernel yet, but will following the write ups in this forum sufficient for me?

They should be sufficient, but if you need extra help, this forum is excellent to provide that

The two things that go "wrong" when you compile a kernel (from what I've seen here, there are a lot of posts about this) is related to sound and console framebuffer, but they're not critical, getting a running kernel isn't hard.

remember to compile in your root file system as well.
Compiling your root filesystem as module won't work.

Well, pre-emptive warning.

don't use make install on the kernel. it's far more likely to make your system not boot than copying files and updating configuration manually.