My expedition into AMD64 ...

I recently purchased three identical servers with 2 AMD Opteron 280 dual core AMD64 CPUs, 8GB RAM, and 4 500GB SATA II hard drives (setup in a 3 drive RAID 5 with Hot-spare) each.

I spent a few days running CentOS 5 for AMD64 (after trying to create several 80GB files the 3Ware RAID went into a coma (it froze and lost about 160GB of space) -- between trying to get support through CentOS channels (e-mail/IRC) and the 3Ware vendor itself I abandoned CentOS.)

Well, I since own the 3Ware cards now - plus I feel the 9550SX cards are good RAID controllers - I spent the last two weeks running Debian AMD64 ... which is "officially" AMD64 supported now; but ... um, well, let's say it's not exactly ready for me -- at least not for what I wanted to do anyways ... but I am trying.

Mostly documented here will be my experiences -- the good, the bad, and the OMG! of this new adventure.

[ ... more to come ... ]
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NOTE: These articles will more or less be posted in reverse order; I'm not really sure how to get them in chronological order...