Compaq Proliant 1000 and linux

["Eric Gjerde" <gjerde@mn.mediaone.net>]

Ok- I acquired a compaq proliant 1000 server. quick rundown- it has 7? EISA slots, I popped in a pentium overdrive chip, has 128MB of parity ram. it has an onboard fast scsi-2 controller (NCR 5710 i believe? not a 5380, sadly) and I have the compaq smart-2/E scsi array controller (EISA), along with an adaptec dual-channel 2740 EISA, and a DPT PM2122 EISA (dpt smartcache III EISA scsi controller). also has a compaq netelligent 10base-t EISA ethernet card (which is theoretically supported by the tlan.o module)

 

Now here's my problem... Redhat 6.0 detects the 2740, which currently only holds an external dat drive.  according to all the info i can find, rh6 is supposed to have support for the smart-2/E and the smart-2/P (pci) raid controllers. this is correlated by the option in the boot disk for the PCI raid controller, but it does not detect the EISA controller that I have (proliant 1000 does not have PCI.) this is quite frustrating because I have 14 gigs of raid 5 array on it, which I would love to utilize, and the onboard controller (which is the best boot controller) has a 2 gig drive and an 8x cdrom. it doesn't see the onboard controller, oddly, even if I format the drive as msdos and boot the install kernel image and initrd with loadlin (I was hoping the bios would kick in and perhaps somehow let it see it. grasping at straws, I know.)

 

Now here's another angle- the DPT PM2122 smartcache III has some sort of IDE translation mode, which I could possibly use; but perusing the DPT web site shows that they have linux support for smartcache IV and smartraid IV. so I'm surprised it doesn't see it, seeing as that they seem to support linux to a certain extent, to where the code could be there.

 

Ack. what a mess. the worst part, I am currently using NT4 because nothing else will install or install AND use the hardware I have in there... I tried linux, freebsd, openbsd, netware 4.11 (which is evil!) and I would love to blow this bloated OS off what would otherwise be a great server box.

 

Anyone who has any suggestions or help will be greatly appreciated. If you can find some sort of working solution, I'll donate a 1gig scsi drive. nothing special, but this is driving me so crazy that I'll resort to bribing.

 

Thanks.

 

-Eric