Red Hat 8

I was tasked with setting up a Red Hat 8 box at work. We don't really have the timely hardware, circa 2002, so i tried one of our standard boxes. The CD would not boot because the new box has all SATA drive connections. No go on Red Hat 8. There might be a driver out there, but come on.

I moved to another box that had both IDE connections and PCI Express. I tried installing on the existing SATA drives because they installer found the drives, so why not. Well, the OS goes through the install process, but hangs on the fist boot at the 'mount local fs' message. Great. I had to go to our graveyard at work and track down a high quality IDE hard drive. I got the OS installed on that drive and found that the OS would not boot because the drive was not master or something like that. So, I had to unplug the CD drive and use only the drive.

Soon after the first boot, I noticed the Ethernet device did not show up. A quick look at Belkin's site and I simply tracked down a stand alone PCI NIC. That worked. The OS will not recognize a thumb drive, the network device, or the CD drive. How the hell do you get something on that box? Well you boot with Ubuntu or Knopix CD and copy files from the USB key. I didn't have to resort to that.

Red Hat 8 does have security and I was able to get the box on our network well enough to log in and mount the network. There has bot be some way to do it or you will never get the box up.

The QLogic drivers just built and worked. Kick ass. You owe me one Adam.