Anyone have to buy Linux lately?

Welcome to RCTalk

Come join other RC enthusiasts! You'll be able to discuss, share and private message with other members of our community.

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate
links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

bigfreak

Gone - bye bye.
Messages
553
Reaction score
0
RC Driving Style
I know these computer nerd threads tend to tank, but I just can't get over that I had the company spend $350 for Linux yesterday. I remember back in 2002 when redhat was all over the news for this, but I didn't think it was that big of a deal. As we all know redhat is the flavor Linux that everyone knows best. It's the one that IT guys use cause it has the most support.

A few month ago, I downloaded redhat 9. I installed it on this crappy Pentium 1 machine to use as a temporary home for my Inventory project (PHP/MySQL). It worked great. Anyway, now that this inventory thing is getting off the ground, I needed a better server. I went for a U1 rackmountable PowerEdge 750. I cloned the IDE hard drive from my Pentium 1 machine. Easy Peasy, Right?

Wrong, I boot it up and I get a kernel panic because it can't see the SATA RAID controller. So surely, someone someplace has fixed something like this. They have updated redhat or they supply redhat driver someplace.. surely... right?

Wrong again. I spent all day yesterday searching and searching and searching. End the end I whipped out my Corp Master Card and paid the $350 for RedHat Enterprise ES. And it works perfectly.
 
Cloning servers like that is always a disaster. Even back in the day of NT4 it was always a no no unless the hardware is exactly the same and even then you are playing with fire. I have never personally paid for Linux but if I was going to use it in the corporate world or if I was suggesting it as a solution for a client I would not let them use it unless they actually purchased it, because really you are purchasing the support not the OS for the most part.

sLY
 
If you clone a Windows 2000/XP machine, you will most likely get a blue screen that says inaccessible boot device. The trick is to manual change the driver on the IDE Controller to the generic "Standard Dual Channel IDE Controller" (or whatever it's called). After you do this, you should have no problems cloning the system. I've done about 10-15 different models this way and had good luck. You have to of course update display drivers, network drivers and all that crap, but it all works out good. You can't use a laptop image ona desktop machine though (it freaks out big time).

I have 14 Windows NT 4.0 Servers. I've changed hardware on 3 or 4 of them. They have always gone pretty easy. I always use the default IDE drivers that come with Windows NT 4.0. I suppose if you upgrade to the "real" IDE drivers, you'd have issues like Win2k/xp do.
 
Was their a reason you wanted to stick with Red Hat? You can download multiple distros for free that are just as good. Matter of fact I just finished downloading and burning Mandrake 10.1 to a DVD+RW. Burning down my linux box at home and installing this is one of tonights projects.
 
Hey Big Freak. I have always been more comfortable building servers from scratch. I have about 15 servers and 700 desktop pc's. The desktops i clone the crap out of. They are xp but we are still running NT4 as the PDC. We are moving over to a 2000 AD network this summer. We are still getting our Wan in place. We will have a gigabit backbone to all 16 buildings. Have you had success ghosting a PDC and have all the shares come over etc?

sLY
 
I'd check with FedoraForum.org or linuxquestions.com as these two forums would be your very best options in terms of Linux. I use linux from time to time but I'm not guru at it by far and those two sites are usually where I go when I have questions.


-Michael
 
My friend set me up with mandrake on an old pentium II box I use for a firewall, nat router, internet connection,web server, file server and ,ftp. It has a Cisco aironet 802.11b 100mw card, and I run it through a telectonics 1 watt smart amp so I can grab internet out of the air for about a ten mile radius heheh.

It's been the most pliable OS I have ever run. It is a text only machine, and we only had a keyboard/monitor hooked up for the installation(ssh ever since). I routionely jerk out the power and move the thing around without proper shut down.

I also use it for site surveys for friends so I am always toting it on the roof, and banging it around. I just cannot belive how stable this OS is, no matter what I do it still boots. (even been known to bugger a script or two)

Of course, I don't need the hardware support like a corporation would, but there always seems to be updates for my hardware whenever I decide to go looking.

Did I mention it's been stable for like 3 years now? Only time it gets rebooted is when I jerk out the cord to move it around.

Anyhow I am throughly impressed with mandrake :D
 
Back
Top