Re: IBM Blade Center - FreeBSD on HS20 type MTM 8832/N1X

Andrea Brancatelli wrote:

>Hello everybody.
>
>Had a nice Xmas holidays? Hope so.
>
>I recently started working in a new company where I'm trying to evangelize 
>FreeBSD. I succesfully got the internal proxies switched to FreeBSD and 
>started to gain some credibility, so yesterday I got a free blade from their 
>BladeCenter just for me to experiment with FreeBSD and such.
>
>So I popped in the FreeBSD CD-Rom (the mini-ISO) to install FreeBSD 6.0 on 
>this nice machine but it didn't work out.
>
>Here's the symptoms... when booting from CD the CD boots regulary, then the 
>"searching for Kernel" part comes in, the whirl starts spinning and 
>everything stop. I mean, it doesn't stop, it keeps spinning and spinning and 
>spinning and spinning, but without doing anything. If I take the CD out of 
>the drive it returns and error complaining it can't find the Kernel and 
>asking me where it should look for it.
>
>I don't have a kernel in my pocket so if it doesn't find the one on the CD I'm 
>pretty blocked.
>
>Do anyone any interesting idea in how to solve this issue?
>
>The hardware layout, for those who may not know it.
>
>It's a dual xeon machine with 4gb of ram, 2 internal (S-ATA) drives (40gb 
>each), one (possibily deactivable) internal Raid controller (deactivating 
>this may be a good try, since Debiand refuses to see the drive as well with 
>this turned on), a SCSI cdrom and a SCSI  floppy drive.
>
>I don't have any fiber optic channel so the SAN/multipath and everything else 
>is not an issue. The keyboard is a PS/2 one, so the USB keyboard isn't an 
>issue as well (I'm writing this because I did some digging in the archives 
>for similar problems).
>
>  
>


Are you sure it's not USB?
We have a LS20 blade-center and the whole media-bay (where floppy and 
cdrom live) and the KVM are connected via USB - it's even USB1.1, so 
installling something from CDROM is dead-slow (in addition, the 
brain-dead java remote-console together with this USB-CDROM-crazyness 
makes remote-installation of RHEL3+4 impossible...).

Your floppy is not SCSI, rather it's connected via USB and the kernel 
makes it look like a SCSI-device...

We've got no local drives, only SAN and as such FreeBSD is pretty much a 
no-go. I need something that works (and is supported) with my SAN...



Rainer