DL 145 G2 and RHEL 4

[Murray Schwalbaum_1]

I have been having some serious difficulties getting a pair of DL 145 G2 servers working with RHEL4 u1 and u2. I have upgraded the BIOS to the latest (it was released about a month ago).

There was a PCI or PCI-E card installed by HP (a gigabit fiber NIC), which does not show up in an lspci.Is anyone else using an add-on PCI or PCI-E card successfully in this system? Even if there are no drivers installed, the device should show up in lspci.

The SATA drives are controlled by a "NVIDIA RAID" controller, and not the BIOS. I am assuming that this is fakeraid, or just software RAID with some BIOS hooks. I am trying to use software RAID (through metadevices on Linux) and sometimes when I boot, only one drive shows up. This happens on both systems, and I have checked the seating of the cables. Besides the drive dissapearing, GRUB won't boot with a disk removed (simulating drive failure). I put two SATA drives in a Dell GX620, and the same kickstart works flawlessly. I can remove drives, and grub works on both drives, just comes up as missing half of the mirror.

HP has not gotten back to me yet, so what are your experiences with the DL 145 G2? I will try got get a copy of stock RHEL 4, with no patches and see if that fixes the PCI issue, but I don't see it fixing the grub problems.

[Murray Schwalbaum_1]

The PCI-X problem is due to a setting in the BIOS that needs to be disabled for RHEL 4u1 and up to work properly.

This is not documented by HP or RedHat, except in the advanced configuration section of the BIOS itself.

[Dan Tucny]

Murray,

I don't suppose you remember which bios setting it was that you disabled to resolve this problem?

Thanks...