Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

Hi,

I have a SGI1100 and a SGI1200 server and I'm going to put a new OS on them. I guess a Linux distro would be best but there are so many to choose from.
There is Fedora Core 6 on the SGI1100 at the moment, but I want something more 'enterprise'
For those who don't know, these servers are Intel Pentium3 based.

I have found references to RedHat and SUSE here, they seem to work well on SGIs. There is also CentOS which should be very close to RHEL (but free) if I understand things correctly.
Maybe I should go with RHEL or SLES. They can be downloaded for free (I think) without support, which I don't want anyway.
It is good if there is support for Itanium, that I'm having in another computer, then I could put the 'same' distro on all Linux machines.

They won't be doing anything serious, just personal fileserver/webserver at most. Well the Itanium will hopefully run some graphics stuff to.

I just wanted to check the opinions in this forum.

Your machines are 100% bog-standard middle/entry level PCs in SGI cases. Almost anything will work, but because of the age of the machines you'll want to shy away from anything that needs high horsepower.

Pick your favorite Windows, Linux or xBSD. I've started reaching for BSDs more as Linux has gotten more and more cruft build up and gratuitous changes (they're on what, the third(?) incompatible variant of the main C library now for some distros?) When BSDs get full ZFS the choice will be easier, since the more-advanced filesystems on Linux are still a draw.

On the Linux side there isn't much difference between enterprise and non-enterprise if you're not paying the money and you install conservatively. RedHat and SuSE are noted because SGI supports them on Altix. Your machine doesn't have all the fancy Altix-ness so you don't need to worry.

I would stay away from ZFS on old hardware unless you have lots of ram - it can be quite the pig.

Although ram is definitely a key ingredient to ZFS, it's not the most important one. 64 bit arch is (IMO). When I put my opensolaris file server together at home I used what I readily had available, 32 bit was painfully slow. I replaced the Intel Pentium setup with a old Opteron 144? (1.8ghz) 939, and only 2gb of ddr. the performance gain was amazing, I'm still running it that way now, but I'm able to easily saturate a 1gige link both up and down.

The other thing that's really hard on processors with zfs is your raid level, raidz1, raidz2, raidz3 are killer, I was hitting 40-60% cpu with 8 spindles in raidz2 on the Opteron, switched it to mirror sets, and my cpu runs at maybe 5% copying files at 130mb/s

On a PIII system if you're trying to run zfs, RAM is the least of your problems

morpheus256 wrote: Although ram is definitely a key ingredient to ZFS, it's not the most important one. 64 bit arch is (IMO). When I put my opensolaris file server together at home I used what I readily had available, 32 bit was painfully slow. I replaced the Intel Pentium setup with a old Opteron 144? (1.8ghz) 939, and only 2gb of ddr. the performance gain was amazing, I'm still running it that way now, but I'm able to easily saturate a 1gige link both up and down.

The other thing that's really hard on processors with zfs is your raid level, raidz1, raidz2, raidz3 are killer, I was hitting 40-60% cpu with 8 spindles in raidz2 on the Opteron, switched it to mirror sets, and my cpu runs at maybe 5% copying files at 130mb/s

On a PIII system if you're trying to run zfs, RAM is the least of your problems

I was drawing together multiple lines of thought in one post - ZFS on PIII is not a good solution, but for general computing on modern hardware a new-gen FS (such as ZFS) on BSD would make it a bit harder to justify Linux (yes, better SMP, but BSD is getting there).

On the ZFS topic, I wouldn't recommend OpenSolaris or Solaris in general because of the age of the HW. Both of those really like 64-bit. On top of that you have the Solaris expense and the OpenSolaris insecurity (as to the future of the project, not so much the computer security).

I had a couple SGI 1100 several years back although being rather plan and nothing fancy with them they were really insanely stable boards. When I first ran the Windows Whistler Beta on it I had an uptime of over 200 days. I also never had any issues running most popular flavors of linux. There is no uncommon or less common hardware on them and if I remember right the motherboards were actually OEMed from Intel and used ServerWorks chipsets. I even used the motherboard out of one in my workstation from 2000 to 2004. The only real issue I had with them is that almost all sound cards would prevent the system from POSTing and I was forced to use a USB sound card if I wanted sound.

Spoon

spoonified wrote: I had a couple SGI 1100 several years back although being rather plan and nothing fancy with them they were really insanely stable boards. When I first ran the Windows Whistler Beta on it I had an uptime of over 200 days. I also never had any issues running most popular flavors of linux. There is no uncommon or less common hardware on them and if I remember right the motherboards were actually OEMed from Intel and used ServerWorks chipsets. I even used the motherboard out of one in my workstation from 2000 to 2004. The only real issue I had with them is that almost all sound cards would prevent the system from POSTing and I was forced to use a USB sound card if I wanted sound.

Spoon

Intel? That's not bad, then. One of those low-end SGI boxes used SIS or VIA.

You are right about the 1100's being stable, they are great workhorses..... I am still using the 1100 (P3 Dual 1ghz) & 1200 (P3 Dual 850mhz) servers running windows 2K as render nodes for Autodesk Backburner to render Max & Combustion files. I actually think that the 1200's are as snappy even with the slower cpu's. SCSI advantage over the IDE drives in the 1100's perhaps? There was a flood of the 1100 servers on Ebay years back when SGI took hammers to the back of the units & sent them to scrap heaven. The motherboards were actually Acer boards, the Intel's were in the 1200's

Timberoz> Craig

Just to chime in on the OS question... My suggestions would be CentOS if you'd prefer Linux, and FreeBSD otherwise. Both seem to have a healthy base of support and a future.

eMGee wrote:

SAQ wrote: One of those low-end SGI boxes used SIS or VIA.

That's outrageous, I bet they weren't sold with ‘low-end’ pricing.

Don't get all excited. He meant low end of their product spectrum. As in, the low end mac of Apples line up would be the MacBook or the Mac Mini. Doesn't mean they suck, Apple just sells other better and more expensive things.