again poweredge 2300

[rcgraves at brandeis.edu (Rich Graves)]

www.brandeis.edu is one of these, and our payroll system runs Oracle
8/Linux on a higher-end server with two Dell MegaRAID cards. I haven't
missed a paycheck.

Dell sometimes likes to make things interesting by changing components
without changing part numbers.

Open the case. If the card says "American Megatrends" on it somewhere,
it's a MegaRAID, and you're in luck. The MegaRAID driver that comes with
all recent kernels will work. I don't know about other distributions but
RedHat 6.0 and higher will recognize it out of the box. The "special" boot
disk hasn't been needed for two years.

If this is a really old machine, you'll want to flash your BIOS and the
flash ROM on the MegaRAID controller itself. It is impossible to figure
out which files to download because Dell often confuses itself about what
its components are called. What you need to do is go to their (excellent)
tech support web site and "Ask Dudley" what to download. You'll need a
Windows machine to make flash boot floppies from the self-extracting
archives they distribute.

If you have the "other" PERC/2 card, from Adaptec, I think you lose. Buy a
DAC960/AcceleRAID, it'll be faster anyway. If you don't really need
hardware RAID, use the internal SCSI bus. It's U2W LVD, nothing to sneeze
at.
-- 
Rich Graves <rcgraves at brandeis.edu>
UNet Systems Administrator

Please don't talk to me about Windows 2000. If you did, it might become illegal
for me to support it. http://www.salon.com/tech/log/2000/05/11/slashdot_censor/

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