a certain group of people I know are planning on buying a Digital Server
5305. According to the vendor and one poxy fax-festered Digital tech info
sheet, the specimen at hand sports the following:
* 1 533MHz 21164 cpu with 4 MB cache
* 1 GB RAM
* 6 PCI + 1 PCI/EISA- slots
* 2*9GB UltraSCSI hot-swap disks
* TZ88N 20/40GB internal DLT tape drive
* an _unspecified_ 3-channel RAID controller
* an integrated 1 MB DRAM PCI SVGA controller
* an integrated PCI Fast-Ethernet controller
Of course there are also the usual extras thrown in for measure, such as
cd-rom drive, floppy drive, monitor, keyboard, blah blah blah. Now, while
all this seems so very fine and dandy, I'd like some expert opinions and
educated guesses as to whether this machine would run Linux/Alpha without
any hindrance, as the server is only designated as "64-bit Windows
NT-ready" and having Windows NT 4.0 as "Certified Operating System", oh
the horror! ;)
Specifically, do any of you see any reason why the RAID controller or the
DLT drive wouldn't work (driver availability etc.)? The make and type
of the RAID controller is strangely unspecified; does this mean that
it's likely to be some DEC thingy, or simply that it doesn't matter one
way or another? Neither is the system board type defined -- do you see any
problems there?
The people who are buying this magnificent beast are very keen on
promoting Linux and would be very pleased if someone could shed light on
these functional matters before they start dishing out the money :-)
* Heikki Kortti *