Tuesday, March 29, 2005

pitviper - Pentium 200MMX, 4 SCSI hard drives, 1 SCSI CD-ROM

I've been working on a system at The Working Centre called pitviper to replace the compaq deskpro I was using as the basement inventory server. Though the deskpro was more powerful, PII 450MHz versus the 200MHz pitviper uses, pitviper has 5 hard drives and a CD-ROM. Setup is as follows:

SCSI ID #0: IBM DCAS-34330
SCSI ID #2: (removed a 2.1GB Quantum for a 9.1GB SCSI IBM drive)
SCSI ID #3: IBM DCAS-34330
SCSI ID #4: TOSHIBA CDROM XM-37017A
SCSI ID #5: IBM DCAS-34330
SCSI ID #7: AHA-2940 Ultra/Ultra W


I low level formatted each of the SCSI drives.

I've installed Ubuntu on the first drive. Ubuntu takes a lot of control away from administrators, it probably wasn't the best choice to begin with. Unfortunately I'll be too busy at work the next couple of days to change the OS. Bill, from TWC, mentioned he wanted a RAID 5 array - I'm not sure why, but since I've never played with SCSI at all before (outside of proprietary SCSI scanner) it's a nice challenge, and working out well.

At home I have a couple of boxes with SCSI cards, my Red Hat 7.2 game server, and my main SuSE desktop box, which is out of commission because I was tinkering at 3am last night. The game machine is interesting because all the SCSI devices are external, a CD-ROM and tape backup. The game machine is, unfortunately, a Compaq-branded machine that has no option to boot to SCSI devices. It's an extremely slim machine, perfect for the application, but I can't boot to CD to install something more recent. A project for another day, but contending distributions are Gentoo, Slackware, and Debian.

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