A software VAR sent me a Dell PowerEdge 840 to install Linux on with SATA RAID1. Booted up the Debian Sarge install - and it bombed. Doesn't support the new SATA controller in the Dell.

No problems whatever with the Dell, but Debian Etch is so different from Sarge in both major and minor ways I had to completely rewrite most of my Install & Configuration documentation - that took days (it's 44 pages in 11-point proportional).

Cups took me most of the day today because of dozens of niggling little changes - like printing to a file is disabled, and when I figured out how to enable it from the deficient documentation it turned out cups won't send a raw stream to /dev/null anymore - and they moved the printer.ppds to an undocumented location where lpadmin can't find them.

Getting cups to work has always been my biggest headache - lousy documentation and it's different problems every time - that development group needs discipline.

But it's done, working and tested: RAID, NFS, TCP/IP, Kernel recompile (with initrd this time), SSH, Samba, FTP - the works - and all documented in minute detail. It took me most of 4 days to do what 'll take an hour and a half next time.

But the next server is next week - not a Dell - I'll be building it, then a couple weeks later I'll be converting an SCO OpenServer machine to Debian by instructing a software guy remotely - so this new documentation is going to get a workout.

. . I've given out copies to interested parties now and then - but It would be a major hassle to covert it to html. Also, it's rather specific to the machines I've dealt with (and that's what makes it so useful to me).

Some sections aren't up-to-date because they haven't been used recently. For instance the modem communication section hasn't been updated since Caldera Linux 2.4 (at least 6 years ago) and the GUI section has been deleted entirely because I haven't done a desktop machine for about that long either.

So basically it'd just be a hell of a lot of work to get it presentable to a public audience.

. . was from the full 21-CD stable set, but apt-get update was run before installing the kernel source - a new kernel source was automatically downloaded from Debian and installed by apt-get install. A couple other packages were also downloaded. All the installing I did used CDs 1,4,5,10 and possibly 2 from the set so copies of those will be shipped with the machine.

I rebuilt the kernel because I never let a machine out without the ability to do so. My work often involves hardware that isn't installed by the distribution and/or configurations that are different. And there can be hardware changes later.

And if you haven't thoroughly reconfigured and rebuilt the kernel, do your really know and understand your machine?

In any case my .config is half the size of the distribution, my initrd is 1/4 the size and my kernel is a few k larger because I built in some drivers that had been modules.

In the past I've always built to boot without an initrd but that seems impractical now.

As for printing to a file, one of the software VARs I set up machines for requires the default printer to print to /dev/nul so it's not an option.

I did have a bit of trouble with NFS but not a lot. I notice Samba now actually requires users to be in the Linux group specified so force group isn't as convenient as it once was. I also noticed OS/2 works better with the Etch Samba than it did with the Sarge Samba.