Tech4Him { Technology With Integrity }

Now that we have had our server working well following our previous instructions, it is now time to tweak some more. Actually, many folks probably thinks this is more thank a tweak and really a necessity. I’d agree with that. Why? Well you just purchased a dual, quad core Xeon server to be fast. Fast is alot of things but certainly processing power is one of those key pieces.

Go to the shell prompt on your server and run the following command:

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep ‘^processor’ | wc -l

Yesterday we finished the installation of a new server. There has
been alot of discussion about how to install Ubuntu 6.06 onto a Dell
PowerEdge 2950 server with a PERC 5 RAID controller. Really the
discussion has been about support for the PERC 5 controller and linux
kernel’s earlier than 2.6.17. The megaraid_sas driver is needed but not properly handled in Ubuntu 6.06 LTS.

By default, the Ubuntu installer has configured our system to get
its IP address and other network settings via DHCP. This is not what we
want so we have to change the server to have a static IP address. Edit /etc/network/interfaces and adjust it per your requirements. For this example we are using an IP address of 192.168.167.210 for this server.

Now,
there are a myriad of examples on the web and I am including a few
links to them for convenience sake in case they explain this better.
(they probably do) ;o)

Well, victory is ours….sort of. See our previous post.

The
long and short of it is that we ended up just removing that Promise
FastTrak TX2 controller card and placed the two drive on the built-in
motherboard controllers. Since we have some other devices we
piggybacked both drives from the same controller which is not going to
be as performance minded as put each drive on a different controller
but for this application it is fine.

Whew….this is a bit of an enigma right now. I know I read about some potential issues with this controller card but it is what we have to use. I thought those issue were primarily around driver support and bit write issues. What I did not expect was the difficulty in installing Ubuntu 6.06 LTS onto a mirror array created with the controller. Perhaps this is a symptom of the “poor driver support” issue?