Newbie needs some help!

[Edward A. Rauch]

Not sure this is the right forum guys so excuse the interruption if not. Please advise if there is a more revelant forum to my requests. I am a recent eBay purchaser of some Older Compaq Rack Mounted Server hardware. I am an old HP man and real familiar with HP but not with Compaq. Anyway the smaller of the two is an older Proliant 850R - Dual Processor etc. etc. I was trying to locate support information on HP's site and it is almost hopeless. Although they even list an 850R in the drop down you select it and they say it doesn't exist. So I selected the 800 Series. And then I could spend a month sorting it all out. So I am hoping someone can give me some basic shoves in the right direction. I finally located the basic specs (so I know what I have and what's in it) but there isn't alot of information available or so it seems as to what the maximum things are that can be supported, can you upgrade the processors to faster say or how much maximum memory it will take etc. I was thinking about installing SUSE Linux on it but wanted to make sure firmware, bios code etc was updated no matter what OS I decide upon. It seems that the Smartstart CD is the way to do this best, so my first of probably many questions is What is the most recent version of the Smartstart CD that I can use on an 850R? Any of the 7 series, or do I need to go back to 6 or even 5? Any ideas? Thanks! EdR

[Oleg Koroz]

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/support/techpubs/maintenance_guides/ProLiant_850R/index.html

max SS CD 5.5
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/support/files/server/us/subscription/ssdownloads.asp


http://h18023.www1.hp.com/support/files/server/us/index.html

[Simon Greener]

Edward,

How did you go installing SUSE Linux on your ProLiant 850R. I have 2 of these (one now only for parts) and I too would like to install SUSE Linux 9.x on this machine but I don't really know how to go about it.

(For example, I am not even sure how to get the ProLiant to boot from a CD!)

Do you have a list of steps that could guide me?

S.

[Edward A. Rauch]

Simon,
Hope this get's to you, haven't actually figured out how to respond to someones questions in the forums, I guess as long as this thread is continued, it will just stay here. On to your question. Unfortunately I have been totally unable to install SUSE 9 Linux on the system due to the Video card only having 1mb onboard. I attempted to add a 2mb card, still no luck. My understanding is you would need at least an 8MB video card to perform a graphical install of SUSE. There is a text method install that comes up (because it can only find the 1MB video card) but I couldn't get it to function properly all the way through. HOWEVER, I was very successful with CentOS, which is truly an Enterprise version recompiled from RedHat source and it's free and you don't have to worry about the support expiring in 30 days or paying for it. If I can be of any further help, let me know! Regards!

[Simon Greener]

Edward,

Ahh.. yes... the 1M onboard video problem.

I would prefer to run SUSE as I can get
access to the CDs etc via work as my current employer is a Novell site. (My home internet access is rather bandwidth limited.)

I suppose a cheap 8M PCI card would do the trick as I only want the machine to be a home based server.

What steps did you use to install CentOS?

Thanks, mate, for such a quick reply.

I rather like my old - but noisy - 850R. I am still rather partial to the PentiumPro cpus. And it will more than suffice for running WAMP, WIKIs, and Postgres! Mine has 3x4G UltraWide SCSI hard drives in it with a pair of 2G backups..... I have 192M RAM (wouldn't say no to more!). More than adequate for what I want to do.

S.

[Edward A. Rauch]

Sorry about that, hadn't checked the forum in a few days and I didn't get an email that anyone had responded. Yeah, I guess if you can spring for 8MB memory video, it might be nice to get SUSE up and running on that bad boy. CentOs worked first time, just identified everything and came right up. This is possibly due to it being really Red Hat and Compaq has supported Red Hat for awhile on these Proliant boxes. I sort of dumped my Linux project however on the 850R for now. I went with Windows 2000 Server after all - for home use (me too!). The only problem I have run into so far is it seems that with the Smart Array a second hard disk (even though I partitioned it as a seperate disk) it is automatically seen by Windows 2000 as a dynamic disk and I would prefer it just be a basic disk, more comfortable with Int13 handling the disk and MBR instead of Windows. Have you ever played with this? I haven't allocated it yet so I would like to take it back to a Basic disk partition method. Anyone know how? Thanks!