[KLUG Members] I drank some Nightshade.....

[Adam Williams]

The server at my house is a dual Pentium II (Klamath, 300Mhz, 512kb
cache) with 256Mb of EDO memory.  In that box I have an IBM IPS
ServeRAID controller (3 channels, 2 pair of 4.5Gb drives), an Adaptec
2940 (4 9Gb drives in an external cabinet) and a Future Domain
controller (actually it is sort-of an Adaptec 2920,  connected to CD and
tape drives).  This system works great.  While I'm entirely satisfied
with CPU performance, I wanted to add more memory.  This board takes EDO
(8 bank) and they are full of 32mb SIMMS.  EDO is expensive and
upgrading would require replacement.

So I picked up an Intel Nightshade 440BX.  It supports ECC DIMMS, and I
can blow it up to 1Gb (at which point I'm assuming my lowly PIIs would
about hit their performance ceiling).  The nightshade also lets one have
a "true" console,  that is BIOS, etc... can be accessed via the first
serial port, as well as some other pretty cool stuff.

So I picked up a nice new ATX case (old one is AT), a power supply
certified for the nightshade, and a 256Mb DIMM.  Moved all the cabling,
drives, controllers to the new box,  and .... ppppppttttttthhhhhh. 
Crap.

The IPS controller resets (ips0: Reseting controller) frequently,  which
takes about 60sec at a crack,  process times out,  in basically doesn't
work.  Actually it did work *once*,  for about fifteen minutes before
the whole thing crashed.  The card itself seems to work fine,  I can run
it's BIOS utility, flash its BIOS, etc... without any problem.  Also the
9gb drives on the adaptec controller time-out every time you try and do
anything there.

So I removed the IPS and tried hooking the system drives up to the
onboard symbios and re-installing.  But to re-install I need to use the
SCSI CD-ROM on the future domain controller,  no dice.  I get a steady
stream of bus errors.  Move the CD-ROM to the Adaptec controller, same
thing, bus errors.

So after hours and hours of mucking about I move everything back to the
old mb and AT case.  Fires up, everything is just fine.

What the pit-bull spit is going on?

How can three different SCSI controllers not work on this board?  Or
work but be hopelessly useless?  When everything works in the other
box.....  I did try moving boards to different slots, not using various
boards, every possible combination.  Nothing had any effect.  Various
things would work for some short random period of time, and then the
whole contraption would dump again

Any idea?

PS.  The Nightshade is "certified" with Redhat 6.2.  And I've found lots
of people using it with Linux (via Google).