Weblog entry #70 for Steve
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I spent a couple of days last week installing SCO OpenServer 5.0.7 upon a pair of new HP rackmount machines.
Never, ever, have we had to face such a difficult installation. But as of Friday we got it working successfully.
I might make a writeup later, but the highlights were:
- The server comes with onboard CD-ROM, but no floppy.
- The onboard RAID controller was not recognised.
- We needed to boot via a special boot-floppy to load the RAID driver - with a lot of parameters to pass to the kernel.
- So I created a bootable CD-ROM with the floppy image.
- Once the driver was loaded we could start the installation
- But it wanted to load something else via a floppy.
- Which failed, since there was no floppy drive.
- Going to the store we bought a USB floppy drive, SCO refused to load the driver from this drive.
Etc, etc.
Eventually the solution was found. We had to disable the onboard floppy disk controller (remember there is no floppy in the system, just the onboard controller). This allowed us to use the USB drive to load the driver.
After that struggle (which took about a day and a half to resolve) we had to install the drivers for the onboard GB ethernet ports.
That was fairly straightfoward once we renamed the driver installation file from VOL_0001.000 to the appropriate name VOL.000.000.
Fun stuff.
And people used to copmlain that Debian was hard to install!
(I'll update this entry with the model number of the HP server just in case somebody needs to google it later. I may or may not go into more details about the insanely large bootstring we had to give the installer.)
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I have to confess I've never even looked at the Hurd OS. I do keep meaning to see how it is coming along, but I have no real expectation it'll be usable in the short term.
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When I looked before that, it basically worked, and the dedicated could presumably have used it for something like web serving. I failed to get X working in it, but I was assured it was "possible" at the time. Certainly it was close, and I only spent a few hours on it, I was somewhat hacked off that I had to write my own GRUB menu.lst entry, since the Debian install failed to set it up correctly despite being the simplest possible case, and Hurd boot strings are seriously non-trivial as multiple things are started (as befits a microkernel) for dedicated LILO users (as I was at the time, now I know a bit more about GRUB I switched).
Whilst the functionality was limited, I was intrigued by the fact that ethernet cards seemed to "just work" (although not DHCP at the time), without consideration for what type of card, or anything like that.
But hey you've been installing OpenServer, and whilst the Hurds future is uncertain, I'd have said the writing is on the wall for SCO, so you pays your money (or not), and takes your choice.
To abuse a quote on Hilbert spaces, "the Hurd is a good introduction to GRUB".
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Thanks for that, I'll try to find a few hours to install it soon.
The last I remember hearing about it was when there was a feature on /. at the time that fork()/exec() was working. If it has progressed to the point where networking is sorted than it might be useful for a few things.
I love the idea of many of the OS features being user-space. I guess in practise I'm unlikely to tweak them, but it is a lot more approachable than the monolithic and large operating systems like Linux.
As for SCO, yeah definitely a company not in its prime. The server(s) were being installed to replace two older ones, which no longer have hardware under support.
I'm pleased that we're just recycling the licenses, so they gain no additional income from us. Although it might have been less painful to install OpenServer 6.0.
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