Linux Driver Support Sucks

We have 6 new IBM x306 servers with IBM ServeRAID 7e HostRAID adapters sitting in our data center. I have been trying to get SUSE 9 installed on one of these servers for several days now. The servers have the new Intel 3.2 GHz EM64T processors. I downloaded an eval of SUSE to see if it fit our needs. We have been handed these servers and were told they were going to be Apache web servers for our new development paradigm. Now they still haven't communicated that paradigm to use lowly support people, but I do what I am told most of the time.

I made my first wrong assumption by thinking that a new OS version should have all the necessary drivers I would need to get this up and running. I am not using white box hardware or some off brand SCSI card. This is all IBM branded stuff and they fully support SUSE. It came up and told me that it couldn't find any hard drives. I decided to then go to IBM's website to get new drivers. Well... they don't have any posted for SUSE 9. I tried a few Google searches, and found a driver on Adaptec's German site. I download it, but couldn't do much with it because my laptop doesn't have a floppy drive. I copied the file to another machine and created the floppy from the image file. I popped it in the server and tried it, but SUSE didn't even detect that there were any updated drivers on the floppy I created.

At this point I broke down and called IBM. They were not of much help either. They don't have a published driver so he said he would do some research and get back to me. At this point I am pretty miffed and thinking to myself "How do people think Linux is going to take over the Data Center when it is so damn complicated to just get the OS installed on a basic server". I went back to SUSE/Novell's website and did another search of their discussion forums. This time I just searched for Adaptec. Well I guess I was trying to be a little too specific with my searches because I finally got a hit for what I needed. The post pointed me to Adaptec's Beta driver site for IBM servers to download drivers for the x306. This finally got me a driver that I was able to use.

I now have two servers with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 installed. Now I have to learn a new OS that I haven't really touched since 1995 when Slackware was the king of Linux distributions.