Server setup.

[Yeormom]

Originally Posted by Andrew80k

Actually, some of the PERC cards are problems under Linux on Dell. The PERC 5/i was particularly notorious for having issues. There are some driver updates that were supposed to help, but they didn't always.

Well, the term Linux is a bit broad these days. I've never seen any problems with PERC controllers on Redhat, CentOS, Oracle EL4, ESX, or Debian-flavor systems. All we've used at the office over the past couple years has been PowerEdge 2850s and 2950s servers running Linux. We have found bugs in the system BIOS (not to be confused with the PERC bios) which have required new releases from Dell to fix. :(

Originally Posted by cavedude

Technically, however that isn't EQEmu's doing. That's just the CPU's natural load balancing techniques.

Actually, it technically is EQemu's doing since world and all zones are spawned as a separate process.

[Andrew80k]

Originally Posted by Yeormom

Well, the term Linux is a bit broad these days. I've never seen any problems with PERC controllers on Redhat, CentOS, Oracle EL4, ESX, or Debian-flavor systems. All we've used at the office over the past couple years has been PowerEdge 2850s and 2950s servers running Linux. We have found bugs in the system BIOS (not to be confused with the PERC bios) which have required new releases from Dell to fix. :(

Indeed, linux is pretty broad. We use PowerEdge 2850's and 2950's. And our issues have only been on the 2850's using Redhat. I understand from researching the issue is that the PERC cards are flashed to solve the issues, and that in some cases this doesn't solve it. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with the flavor of Linux as the issues that I have seen have been on different distros. It seems like it is related to how the particular interface on the PERC card reacts with the linux driver, but it has been a LONG time since I've done any driver development on Linux so can't say for sure.

We have yet to solve our issues as it is only a problem for us on boot up and we rarely boot the machines. Unfortunately for us, the problem machines are in a remote data center and require manual intervention when booting. We are looking at putting an IP KVM in there but it hasn't happened yet.

[Yeormom]

Are you compiling your own drivers or using the precompiled binaries from Dell?

[Andrew80k]

Originally Posted by Yeormom

Are you compiling your own drivers or using the precompiled binaries from Dell?

I'm not certain to be honest. Those machines have been around a while, before I started working here and are in the UK so I don't really know how they were set up. I do believe that we run off of a canned kernel, which is mostly because of support issues.