On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 12:29 PM, jtd <jtd@mtnl...> wrote:
>
> On Wednesday 09 September 2009, Mayank wrote:
> >  My first worries are about purchase of hardware for this project and
> > I am pretty much stuck up as no major vendor except HP is providing support
> > for Debian and pushing the idea of installing a unsupported OS to top
> > management would not be an easy task as well.
>
> Firstly distros have very little to do with the hardware. It's the kernel
> which takes care.
> Secondly you will have to list out your hardware requirements particularly if
> its SAS or other specialised storage hardware. I am presuming the cpu is
> Intel / AMD.
> Thirdly you are pretty much up the creek with most of the specialised hardware
> unless the internal components are COTS "unbranded" stuff. Software will be
> the least of your issues after 3 years. Before that period anything works
> anyway.
> Fourthly if it's branded stuff check the SLAa very closely and compare costs.
> Most of the time the money spent on branded stuff and SLAs is a total waste.
>
> CAVEAT EMPTOR: Your organisation has technically sound hardware and sysadmins
> around.
>
> > Can I consider the
> > report displayed by http://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl as final and dump my idea of
> > installation of Debian or will the lack of support for some of the drivers
> > won't have much effect on functioning of my system. This is the question
> > which is worrying me the most as of now, because I don't want my servers to
> > hang up in middle of operations at later stage and it would be really nice
> > if someone can help me out on this front.
>
> Lack of support is usually endemic to graphics, sound and hardware raid.
> On a server these are usually more a hindrance, consuming power unnecessarily.
> Rarely it's the sata / network phy devices.
>
> Also check out coreboot / linuxbios. If your motherboard is listed as
> supported you dont have a worry in the world. This project gets rid of the
> bios and has linux as the bios - ya you dont even require a disk.
>
>
>
> --
> Rgds
> JTD
> --
> http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers

Hi,
   Thanks for the information however as I've already mentioned in my
earlier post, my worries are about some components which are not being
listed as being supported by Debian and though Debian got installed
without hassles on my server, can I be confident that lack of support
for some of the components like USB controller, LCP bridge, SMBus
controller, etc. won't cause my server to go down in near future ? I
am asking this question again because I've seen several machines go
down abruptly in middle of operations and as this project is going to
span entire country with OS being deployed by different implementation
agencies so my concerns are much greater as I can't say anything about
competency of different implementation agencies.

However if I am able to verify that a set of particular hardware
components are working fine with Debian (well with a particular
kernel) then I might be able to make a firm decision about procurement
of the same.

  Also, is there a way to find list of hardware components compatible
with a particular kernel version. I saw a project on sourceforge which
allows one to view list of pci devices compatible with Linux however I
am not sure if that would be a correct way.

  I also found modules.pcimap file on my system which contains list of
different driver modules. However to map the device id to a particular
device is something which seem like a hurriculane job to me. Also this
would require me to first purchase a hardware and then verify it's
compatibility against modules.pcimap. Is there a categorical list of
hardware components supported by a particular kernel available on
Internet ?

Thanks and regards,
Mayank


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