Ubuntu a poor choice for servers

[David Kempe]

David Abrahams wrote:
> Could you give more details?  If I have to complain to the person who
> sold me the hardware (knowing I'd be running linux on it), I want to
> be able to justify myself.

the forcedeth driver is reverse engineering, much like the nv driver 
versus the nvidia binary driver. I think you could get the nvidia binary 
drivers to work with the nvidia nforce chipset/nic, but am certain thats 
not going to play nice with xen (at least not until xen becomes a subarch).
we have had crazy issues with forcedeth cards - like lockups where the 
card stops tx/rxing data completely, and only way to fix it is to pull 
the power cord, a reboot doesn't fix it. its related to acpi stuff 
mostly. also the driver is slow to get link, which causes problems for 
init scripts and it generally crap, not supporting features I like to 
use like ethtool or mii-registers.
I don't doubt for a second its going to get better, reverse engineering 
is always a work in progress, so maybe its just a matter of time. But 
frankly, if nvidia just damn opensourced decent drivers it would be a 
whole lot better. Its a freaking network card for crying out loud 
(although I know is all integrated in the chipset - probably to reduce 
the cost).
the better tyan mobos have broadcom nics in them, and AMD chipsets, all 
very well supported.

dave