🚀 go-pugleaf

Great!

I've got my IBM Netfinity 3000 (PII 400MHz, 128MB, 2940 SCSI) today! It
was a no-disk config, so I decided just to put an IDE 6.8GB Maxtor unit
I had with Linux 2.0.35 already installed on it.

Power on...

Dilbert (yeah, it's my server's name...) found out that a new disk had
been installed, reconfigured itself, re-booted... At this time, I had a
phone call, left Dilbert alone for a few minutes. When I came back, I
was quite impressed to see the 2.0.35 login prompt!

Quick kernel reconfig and patching to make it recognize the 2940 and the
Ethernet card (thanks to Lee Allen, I knew it was the eepro100 driver),
make dep, make clean, etc... WOW! That beast is fast! It's almost a
pleasure to recompile the kernel! reboot...

The Colorado SCSI tape drive was ok, built-in ethernet was ok, but my
second ethernet card (D-Link 6xx PCI?) wasn't configured as eth1. hum...

A quick look in /proc/pci showed that the device was detected and
correctly identified. So I added 'ether=9,0x7c00,eth1' to the boot
params, reboot again... (no problem, it's fast!)

And eth1 was available!

Perfect. I haven't made any more tests so far (got some real work to
finish before the end of the week), but I think there are no trouble in
sight...

As I already said in a previous message, IBM is currently running some
serious tests on the Netfinity serie, and plans to certify the machines
for Linux. Looks good to me.


About the hardware, I must say the box is well built, solid and easy to
access. The only point is the first install of peripherals in the front
bays: Removing the black plastic covers is easy, but there are some
metallic grills(?) to be removed before you can put the disk into the
bay. Removing these @#ç% grills was a pain: at the beginning, I was
doing it carefully, but after a while, I had to push and pull on them
pretty hard to take them out! They finally gave up.


What else?... Oh! They (IBM) are still shipping the machine with a set
of CD-ROMs with OS/2 Warp Server, NT Server, Novell, SCO OpenServer, and
quite a few applications (Lotus Domino and several utilities). Needless
to say, the box is still un-opened! Can't wait to see them shipping
Slackware, RedHat, Debian, Caldera, SUSE or any distribution of a *real*
OS!

Well it seems they have some nice config tools running directly from the
CD. Maybe I'll give them a try one of these days...


Ok, next step is going to be the migration of my main SCSI disk from
gonzo to dilbert. I'm pretty confident that this will work like a
breeze, but I now have to eat something...


Thanks to Lee Allen, Nathan Norman and Trevor Coghlan for their comments
and advices that helped me taking the decision to buy this box, and made
its installation even easier.

-- 
Pierre Moret, pierre@skyweb.ch
skyweb developments SA/AG