March 14, 2004

Installing Gentoo on a Fortress 9100

Just a couple of notes on installing Gentoo Linux (2004.0) onto a Fortress 9100. (Some of them apply to any distribution, but that’s your problem.) The install was fairly painless and mostly by the book. But…

  • Before you start: the onboard SCSI adapter will detect SCA drives from right to left, so the drive in the right-hand slot will be /dev/sda, the drive in the left-hand slot /dev/sdb. (Or more specifically, the SCSI adapter will assign LUN 0 to the right-hand slot, LUN 1 to the left-hand slot.) I don't know if it does this for non-SCA drives. Be sure you've got the drives in the right place before you start the install.
  • Booting from the Gentoo 2004.0 LiveCD works fine (I used the 'Universal' one optimized for P3); when asked for boot options, I used: smp nohotplug doscsi. For some reason something seemed to hang in the hotplug detection the first time.
  • The boot process did not detect the dual onboard ethernet ports, likely because 'nohotplug' specified, so once you're booted issue a modprobe eepro100 and both will get detected.
  • Since the network ports didn't get detected the network wasn't automatically setup. I was behind a DHCP router so I just setup the network with net-setup eth0. (BTW, eth0 is the LAN port on the power input side)

Everything else goes as normal, just follow the excellent Gentoo installation instructions.

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