Suggestions solicited, server bring up

[Chip Marshall]

On November 14, 2009, Bruce Labitt sent me the following:
> In the pursuit of more computation power, I've been promised a server
> class machine to 'play' with. I believe it is a Dell 2950. Yes, it is
> already obsolete, but it was free and has double the amount of memory
> I have on my desktop. Anyways, I'd like to install Ubuntu 9.04LTS on
> it. I've never done a server install before, what is recommended? What
> baseline packages are in Ubuntu Server? I believe there is hardware
> raid on the 2950, can Ubuntu server deal with this? Any other gotchas
> I should be aware of?

Dell is actually pretty good about supporting Linux on the PowerEdge
line, they've even got some mailing lists at http://lists.us.dell.com/
which may prove helpful.

While I've never run Linux on one of them, I have run FreeBSD on a
number of Dell PowerEdge servers, mostly 2850s and 2950s, and for the
most part everything works very well.

I've heard that the RAID is unstable under older Linux kernels, but that
was 3~4 years ago, so I suspect it's been fine for a while now.

-- 
Chip Marshall <chip at 2bithacker.net>
http://weblog.2bithacker.net/          KB1QYW        PGP key ID 43C4819E
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