Today's adventures in sitting in a data center were brought to you by Compaq, who don't really answer the questions asked.

So I'm trying to get Linux to install on this old-by-internet-standards (a year?) Compaq ProLiant 7000 server in the data center, as part of our migration to the new reporting package we're moving to (whenever they decide to unfreeze our budget, but that's another story, probably best told by somebody else anyway). I've been at this a few days now, since we have a kickstart server and it's supposed to be possible to set up a profile, boot the server from a floppy, connect it to the kickstart server, and have everything else automagically go onto the target server.

Didn't happen that way. First off, the guy who knew the most about the kickstart server was out of the office on jury duty last week, so I couldn't really get anything done. Then, this week, between his schedule and mine, and the Two Gentlemen of Japan who showed up three hours early for a tour of the data center yesterday, it's been an on-again, off-again process. I've been guided by the knowledge that it should by all rights be possible to get Linux onto this server, so the difficulties along the way have been all the more exasperating.

The server has dual redundant RAID controllers. Linux seems to be confused by this. After several failures of the installer, all complaining about difficulty mounting some drive, I finally thought to look at the partitions in fdisk. And there was the problem, or part of it: for every partition that showed up properly (/tmp/ida/c0d0pX), there was an identical partition showing up (/tmp/ida/c1d0pX). Aside from the fact that I was expecting them to be in /dev and not /tmp (which I could deal with pretty easily), this looked like a pretty large problem. I'd already downloaded the latest version of the Linux driver for the RAID controller(s) so I knew that wasn't it. I was tired of banging my head aginst the problem, so I hit the Compaq support site and typed up a description of the problem and what I'd done to try to fix it.

The response? They told me that one thing I'd done (use Partition Magic) wouldn't work (it does, I've done it before), to do something I'd already done, and they didn't answer the question I actually asked. Luckily for you, this was more than 24 hours ago, so you don't have to see me wave my arms and yell in frustration at the laptop display, "didn't you read my message at all!?" So I sent back an email overlooking the Partition Magic thing and reiterating my original question, then I went home.

So when I got to work today, there was another email from Compaq that also didn't really help. Dorks. I'd talked to somebody else at work, who'd suggested that I just pull the redundant controller, so I tried that. I couldn't get the kickstart to work, but this time at least the manual install was successful. Eh. Only a week and a half wasted on this problem. The guy who runs the kickstart server then created a shell script to get the machine up to standard, so today ended up actually being productive.

And for more fun, I have jury duty tomorrow. Ehh.

link (26 oct)