Hi,
Whats' the best motherboard you ever ran CentOS on?
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Don't read this unless you have lots o' spare time, and please, no
flamers or kook-jobs with wierd attitudes, this is just plain old
hardware as it relates to centos talk -no politic or mean folks.
Background (why I ask about centos-friendly hardware):
As I order alot of servers, I have alot of vendors telling me all sorts
of stuff. It gets pretty extreme sometimes. I play poker each Sat. eve
with a Google Engineer, but we never talk about work. One day we might,
but I thought i'd ask the list, because there are alot of vendors out
there who contradict just about everything I see on the list that I
consider to be excellent advice, given by really talented and
positive-minded folks, true professionals.
One thing I remember reading about Google is that they choose commodity
hardware and engineer the $%^&* out of it and basically add it into a
hive/clusterlike existence where it metes out it's daily
java/mail/database/ftp/memcache sessions. The modular nature of the
hardware allows both scaling, and spontaneuous disaster recovery of very
high quality. http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5875433.html
I have chosen to follow the same logic, or at least continue down the
path of those before me that made this choice.
From my view, my CentOS machines that never break, run happiest on
AMD-friendly boards, with older onboard Broadcomm GBnics that support
NIC bonding and handle excess internet & internal snmp (cacti & nagios)
traffic without blowing up.
I can rave about Crucial (Micron) RAM, and AMD Opteron CPU's, and
Seagate & Fujitsu SCSI SCA 80 pin drives, Chenbro 2U rackmount 6* SCA
cases, Zippy redundant power supplies, LSI Logic MegaRAID 320-2
controllers -but the basis of it all is the board. It's got all the
other parts no one talks about. It's the source of many a dmesg
output. With the right board, life is much much easier.
Right now I run using Tyan S288@UG3NR-D Dual Core Opteron SCSI SATA GBe
LAN boards.
I have a vendor that consistently says they get complaints on Tyan
boards, but out of the cluster, none of mine have ever died. The Dells
die, and get replaced. The remaining Sun's, seem to never die even
though I wish they would. Not that i'm a fan of Tyan, -but oddly enough
this particular board works great.
I noticed alot of the hardware advice Johnny gives (hardware &
advice/fixes) just so happens to coincide with vendors saying the exact
oppposite thing. They say go with ATI and broadcomm right when he's
actually helping someone fix something related to one of those
components. Sometimes on the same day.
If we as engineers are to have any say in our industry, it's going to
happen when we all talk outside the box of BS theory and FUD or
over-analysis or analysis-for-analysis'-sake.
Right now Intel has things such that it's actually a little difficult to
find a stock 2U production linux system unless you actually break it
down part-by-part and vet the whole thing. Just curious about your
opinions and advice -is there a spec you follow that you like?
Way back when, you'd either order a Supermicro-type system, or get a VA
Linux type machine. What do you do now? If you happen to be trying to
spec out a solid Linux server, I can say that the spec I arrived at
handles over 100,000,000 page views a week -that's 1/3rd of CNET. It's
all CentOS, the whole thing. A percentage of you might have travelled
across them, especially if you happen to read news on the web.
Commodity is the way to go. Get 40 servers for the price of one
commercial vendor machine. CentOS is very real my friends -let's talk
hardware! Maybe we can help the centos project out by doing so.
I have to say, i'm sticking with my own hardware choices, -so please
don't view this as someone trying to get a hardware spec for free -the
intention here is to solidify our own base as centos users, sysadmins.
-krb
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