Penguin Servers... Can't Install OS

[soundblastdj]

I recently bought 5 servers off of craigslist to use for upgrades to my home server setup. One is an old Penguin Relion 140 that is working fine, one is an old HP Proliant that has a broken power button, and 3 are Penguin Altus 1600SA.

The Alltus servers... bought these Saturday night and since then have put in close to 48 hours trying to get some sort of OS to load. My first attempt was Ubuntu Server. I've tried all main releases (x64 and x86) from 12.04 to 14.10. Part way through the installation, the servers would lock up and wouldn't respond to anything but a hard shutdown. I posted a thread on the Ubuntu Forums there and I'm not making much progress. Only two of these Altus servers are going to run Ubuntu Server, one is going to run some sort of NAS OS.

I ran NAS4Free on my old Dell Poweredge server, but that's left the rack already and it's not going back in. NAS4Free is doing the same thing at the install as Ubuntu server and I now have the power to run FreeNAS so I decided to make the switch. FreeNAS makes it so far through the installation process before locking up. It's the furthest yet. It will get to "Setting hostname: nas4free.local" and then stop. Nothing will respond and i have to do a hard shutdown.

I can't figure out what's going wrong. Does anybody know what's up? I've never had this problem before.

 

[gpsguy]

Since penguins are associated with Linux and FreeBSD (FreeNAS) <> Linux, then it's no wonder you are having problems.

Seriously, you didn't provide any hardware details per the forum rules. How much RAM do they have? 512Mb? Please provide detailed information.

 

[soundblastdj]

Sorry. Forgot about the specs. Two dual-core AMD Opteron processors (1.8 GHz), 24 GB RAM, an assortment of hard drives. They seem to be made for Red Hat and SUSE, but they locked up just the same when I tried those disks.

 

[gpsguy]

It looks like your Penguin Altus 1600SA are nearly 10 years old. FreeNAS is designed to run on more recent hardware.

Rather than test it with modern OS's, I'd try something old. Start with SLES/RedHat circa 2006.

Re-sell/recycle them and buy decent hardware. FreeNAS can run on budget hardware - but this stuff is junk, as far as FreeNAS 8/9 is concerned.

 

[marbus90]

Also FreeNAS is untested on AMD systems. New AMDs might be okay, but the older boxes with a combo of nvidia or other weird chipsets with AMD CPUs do not bode well.

 

[soundblastdj]

Actually, it seems that the servers might have been overheating. I took the top cover off of one and put a box fan on it and let the install run. So far it doesn't seem to have locked up.