[lug] Fiber channel card that works with the stock RHEL 4 Kernel?

[Nate Duehr]

On 4/4/07, Bryan H Shelton <Bryan.Shelton at colorado.edu> wrote:
> We are interested in fiber because we purchased an Apple XRaid, which
> we've been really happy with, and fiber is the only way to access it
> directly.  Honestly given our size we probably wouldn't be looking at
> the fiber technology were this not the case.  QLogic, which was
> recommended earlier to me, does make a small and medium size business
> fiber HBA.  Because Apple pushed the XRaid out with only fiber
> access, they sold a relatively inexpensive fiber HBA for their
> hardware at the time we purchased the XRaid.  I haven't tried to see
> if it will work in linux, it looks like a branded LSI Logic card.
>
> Bryan

Just curious Bryan, if you went with the XRaid why not pair it up with
an XServe and save the hassle?  These days my life mostly deals with
SunFire servers with Sun StorEdge JBOD hardware, so I have no "dog in
this fight" -- but I do have a friend who's running a mostly Apple
shop (marketing/advertising shop back East) and with the combo you get
true point-and-click management of the XRaid.

Honestly, I joke with him regularly that his company he works for (and
has for a long time) keeps growing and adding users, and he's like the
Maytag repairman... the Apple stuff he maintains just runs and runs,
and the only failures he ever deals with are the usual hardware issues
on business laptops...

They're up to about 50, maybe 100 people and they continue to operate
just fine with a single "IT" do-it-all person, him.

Most of his day is helping users with the usual problems, and being
the "telco/IT/network/information tech manager" guy.

He spends more time maintaining the company cell phones, contracts for
various services including cellular, telco, and maintenance for the
Apple gear.

He had enough time "left over" last year and the year before to slowly
migrate away from an Avaya/Lucent small PBX system to Asterisk and
VoIP phones.   That was done on Linux, but that makes sense, due to
that being the generally accepted "home OS" of Asterisk.

The Apple gear gives him virtually no problems at all.  During the
conversion from Apple OS 9 to OS X, he had to learn some *nix skills,
but he's happy as a clam in the *nix environment Apple's provided...
didn't take him long to love the flexibility of *nix mixed with the
GUI simplicity of most of the setup.

Not trying to sound like an Apple commercial on a Linux list, but
frankly -- Linux on the desktop is still an utter joke compared to OS
X... I have family members happily using Macs who know NOTHING of the
power underneath the shiny GUI, and don't need to... all the way to
friends who work on hardcore *nix programming, admin, and security who
all use Macs now...

So... with that information as "background" -- I have to ask... Why no
XServe?  It can share the XRaid out as an NFS/Samba/whatever mount
just as well as a Linux box can, and it'll warn you in the GUI if a
disk fails, etc etc etc.... plus you still can script things for your
own tastes...

Nate