OS for a Dell Poweredge Server? Opinions, please.

[duncanbojangles]

Hola. I just got a Dell Poweredge 6100/200 from my dad's office. It's got four Pentium processors rated at 200 MHz each. It also has four SCSI hard drives which are set up in a RAID configuration, RAID 2 I believe. Two of the hard drives are 36 Gig 10K RPM SCSI drives and I'm not sure of the other two. I believe they are hot-swappable, but I'm not about to try and test it out. It's also got a SCSI CD ROM.

I was wondering what OS would you guys recommend for a machine of this description. Everything I run is Slackware, and I've dabbled in FreeBSD for a while. It may or may not get turned into a file server, but probably not since I've already got one that doesn't sound like a jet taking off.

I wanted to try some of the BSD's and I was thinking I wanted to try NetBSD. What do you guys think?

Also, if someone could recommend some silent case fans, that would be great. I wasn't kidding when I said this thing sounds like it's a jet taking off. BIG case fans.

[JohnT]

You might get better all-around hardware support with FreeBSD.

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

I'd go for either Net or FreeBSD. With older hardware, you should be in good shape with either.

Moving to .iso confused, as this is a "Which distro?" question.

[sharth]

http://linux.dell.com/
www.silentpcreview.com

[duncanbojangles]

Thanks for the tips. I think I'm going to go with NetBSD since I've heard some good things about it. I'll let y'all know how it goes. And thanks for the link for silent computing products. Did I mention that this thing is really loud?

[hard candy]

I'm not that experienced with this type of server, I'm wondering if a Gentoo compile from Stage 1 with the optimizations tuned carefully would not be an interesting project with this set-up.

[duncanbojangles]

I doubt I have the patience for a Gentoo compile. If I forgot to mention, it's four Pentium Pro processors running at 200 MHz , not to be confused with a 64 bit AMD Athlon 3200. I believe that the wait wouldn't justify the end since I'll only play around on the thing.

But, if there's some way you can perform a Getoo installation through SSH or telnet, I'll forward a port and leave it on for you. Hell, I'll even pop in the CD when you need me too. :)

P.S. I'm serious about the networked install.

[sharth]

i don't know how early it can be used in the gentoo install, but look at distcc

[BMK1st]

I don't know if it's good idea to install gentoo. It'll take a while to complete base install then more time to compile packages for services (apache, mysql, etc). Try Debian, Slackware, or FreeBSD(with pkg_add). It'll be less time-consuming than gentoo for your dell machine.

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

Personally, I'd be looking at Debian or FreeBSD for this machine. Debian's a nice system to run on a machine like this, due to the availability of binary packages, installable via apt. FreeBSD's about the same way, too; if you wanted to try a *BSD for serving, firewalling, etc, that'd be a prime system to try it out on.

Or heck, if all else fails, you could pack it in a box, and ship it to me, and you could just live vicariously through me. I could email you updates as to what I'm doing with it, and even send pictures. I've been looking for a dual or quad SMP box to give a good home to. ;)

[duncanbojangles]

Thanks for the reply. I finally quit wondering and just got down to business a few weeks ago. I installed Slackware 10 and recompiled the kernel to include support for my SCSI adapters, RAID, and SMP.

But now it's kinda pointless. I've got no use for it. It's loud as all heck, enormous, and takes up the space where my knees used to go at my computer table. I was thinking of selling it on eBay, but I was put off by having to ship it. It's extremely heavy!