This is a diary of my newest educational research endeavor: The Green Project. The idea is to give CS students a little more insight into hardware and system level programming by having them build green systems.
To start off the project, I purchased a used server off of Ebay, an HP ProLiant DL580 G2 server. This beast (and it most definitely is a beast) boasts four 2.0 GHz Xeon processors, 4 Gb's of RAM and four SCSI 15K hard drives in a RAID configuration (RAID 5). It has at least seven fan and needs a 14 Gauge power cord (which I had to fabricate myself since it uses an uncommon C19 plug).
I'm going to put on a Kill-A-Watt power monitor just to see how many Joules per second the beast consumes.
Did I mention this thing weighs close to 100 lbs?
The first install attempt was with Edubuntu Server 7.04 edition. I was a little worried since nothing was happening on the monitor for what seemed to be a long time, but finally the ProLiant splash screen appeared. Things went along rather swimmingly after that until a corrupted gcc package was detected. After a few more corrupted packages, the installation procedure decided it could not go on. I suspect I had a bad install disk (I burned it myself).
Also, the network connection was not recognized; I had plugged the network cable into the ILO (Integrated Lights Out) port on the back of the beast. I haven;t figured out how to turn on the ILO port yet.
Rather than reburn an Edubuntu install CD, I took a regular Ubuntu 7.04 Server (Fiesty Fawn) install disk I had burned earlier. I had plugged in a NIC into one of the non-hot plug PCI-X slots into the back.
I turned on the beast and the fans roared but the monitor remained blank. Figuring the NIC was bad, I turned off the beast, pulled the NIC and turned the beast back on. Viola! Bassoon! The splash screen appeared and Ubuntu server installed like a charm. No network, though.
In reading the online documentation for the DL580 G2 [insert link here], I saw how to mainipulate the hot-pluggable PCI-X slots. A green LED at the slot indicates power to the slot. To turn off power to the slot (the first step in putting in or taking out cards), one presses the port colored button (port is HP's term, not mine). What is suppose to happen is the little green LED flashes for a bit and then goes out, indicating a lack of power to the slot. For me, the green LED burned ever so brightly and steadily.
I then rebooted and pressed F9 at the proper time to get into the BIOS setup program. There I saw two things. One was an entry for selecting the operating system. The documentation said that the OS needed to be selected before the install. Of course, the selected OS was some Microstuff thing. I changed the OS to Linux and then, feeling adventurous, I changed the Hot Plug options X to enable and X to add. I rebooted and tested the old port button the a Hot-pluggable PCI slot. Lo and behold, the green LED started winking merrily. It finally went out and a placed the NIC into the newly de-powered slot. Seating the card and locking it in, I pressed the port button again and the green LED winked and winked and then went off. Worse yet, an amber LED came on. On the DL580 G2, an amber LED almost always means a fault of some kind or the other. I tried reseating the card in the same slot and a different slot, but always the amber LED. Thinking the card was bad, I gave up on the network and started to reinstall Ubuntu Server (remember, the docs said install after selecting the OS in the BIOS).
The third attempt was a charm (as it should be). Not only did the boot info thrown to the screen indicate that the DL580 was optimized for Linux, when it came time to scan the hardware, a network interface was found. Gloryoskies! I threw open the beast and there was the cheeriest little green LED indicating that in the slot containing the network card, everything was hunky-dory!
The success with Ubuntu Server leads me to believe that Edubuntu should work with a decent disk.
For an actual step-by-step account of the installation, see install.