I am considering buying a HP Proliant server for my company. Most likely a ML series. Speed and load requirements are low, reliability requirement is high.

Many moons ago when WinNT was current I sold some Compaq servers to customers. I liked the way those servers were built with reliability in mind. I mean, those were servers, not consumer desktop machines.

I also remember that Compaq had their own way for installation if the OS. There was some Compaq setup program, apparently on a separate partition of the disk which did the first part of the install and eventually you had to insert the WinNT cd to install the real OS.

On the first machine I foolishly tried to do it My Way by booting off the OS CD, for the next machines I had read the manual better and did it the Compaq way which was better.

When browsing thru this forum I see that the Proliant still is a bit special with separate service partitions etc. Compaq officially supports RHEL, but I am not a RHEL man.

Now my idea is to use the Compaq way of installing, but install Debian. Are there experiences with this installation? Is there still a special installation procedure, and can it be done using Debian?

jlinkels

http://lackof.org/matt/hacking/proliant/

some good news for you

http://wiki.debian.org/HP/ProLiant

Hi,
I bought an HP Proliant ML about 3 months ago and installed Ubuntu Server (I know not debian per se) + VMWare server and all worked fine (and is still working fine). No probs at all.
A

Tell you something... I wanted to hear user experiences but I completely forgot to google for it

Thanks for your reactions, it certainly sounds encouraging.

jlinkels

Sorry I can't give you any user experiences on this piece of hardware with this OS installed
But I hope the Links I fished out for you are useful.

Oddcheck, yes those links were very useful and did include user experiences. When I saw that page I realized that I didn't Google and I wondered why I didn't. That is where I usually start.
Thanks again

jlinkels