On Wed, 2009-09-09 at 14:00 +0530, Mayank wrote:
On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 12:29 PM, jtd jtd@mtnl.net.in wrote:
On Wednesday 09 September 2009, Mayank wrote:
My first worries are about purchase of hardware for this project and I am pretty much stuck up as no major vendor except HP is providing support for Debian and pushing the idea of installing a unsupported OS to top management would not be an easy task as well.
Firstly distros have very little to do with the hardware. It's the kernel which takes care. Secondly you will have to list out your hardware requirements particularly if its SAS or other specialised storage hardware. I am presuming the cpu is Intel / AMD. Thirdly you are pretty much up the creek with most of the specialised hardware unless the internal components are COTS "unbranded" stuff. Software will be the least of your issues after 3 years. Before that period anything works anyway. Fourthly if it's branded stuff check the SLAa very closely and compare costs. Most of the time the money spent on branded stuff and SLAs is a total waste.
CAVEAT EMPTOR: Your organisation has technically sound hardware and sysadmins around.
Can I consider the report displayed by http://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl as final and dump my idea of installation of Debian or will the lack of support for some of the drivers won't have much effect on functioning of my system. This is the question which is worrying me the most as of now, because I don't want my servers to hang up in middle of operations at later stage and it would be really nice if someone can help me out on this front.
Lack of support is usually endemic to graphics, sound and hardware raid. On a server these are usually more a hindrance, consuming power unnecessarily. Rarely it's the sata / network phy devices.
Also check out coreboot / linuxbios. If your motherboard is listed as supported you dont have a worry in the world. This project gets rid of the bios and has linux as the bios - ya you dont even require a disk.
-- Rgds JTD -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
Hi, Thanks for the information however as I've already mentioned in my earlier post, my worries are about some components which are not being listed as being supported by Debian and though Debian got installed without hassles on my server, can I be confident that lack of support for some of the components like USB controller, LCP bridge, SMBus controller, etc. won't cause my server to go down in near future ? I am asking this question again because I've seen several machines go down abruptly in middle of operations and as this project is going to span entire country with OS being deployed by different implementation agencies so my concerns are much greater as I can't say anything about competency of different implementation agencies.
However if I am able to verify that a set of particular hardware components are working fine with Debian (well with a particular kernel) then I might be able to make a firm decision about procurement of the same.
Also, is there a way to find list of hardware components compatible with a particular kernel version. I saw a project on sourceforge which allows one to view list of pci devices compatible with Linux however I am not sure if that would be a correct way.
I also found modules.pcimap file on my system which contains list of different driver modules. However to map the device id to a particular device is something which seem like a hurriculane job to me. Also this would require me to first purchase a hardware and then verify it's compatibility against modules.pcimap. Is there a categorical list of hardware components supported by a particular kernel available on Internet ?
Thanks and regards, Mayank
HI Mayank, I really dn't know about the intencity of your project or its scale. But Debian as well as ubuntu is deployed on many heavy projects at the server side. And I think the kind of hardware devices you were refering such as the USB controller etc are supported in the latest kernel versions. All in all You can be pritty confident about the server. If at all you are concerned then it will also be a good idea to consult some professional support provider for debian. There are a lot of them around in Mumbai as well.
Happy hacking. Krishnakant.