I have teared enough hairs from my skull to make a rug trying to install Ubuntu Server 8.10 on a HP ProLiant DL360 server. The short answer is it will not work and the quick solution is install Ubuntu Server 8.04.1-LTS instead.
The longer answer is that has to do with the disks. The DL360 (and supposedly its sibling servers) use a RAID that Ubuntu 8.10 does not understand. It doesn’t matter if i tell it to enable or disable SATA RAID, or to use or not use LVM. The system installs nicely but after that, it just won’t boot. Same goes with both the x64 and x86 versions of Ubuntu Server 8.10. Since the RAID is enabled in hardware, i am supposing that my disks are mirrorred and that i’m protected on that plane. The 8.10 setting probably just allowed me to actually see that we have a RAID going on. Transparency is always nice.
I’ve read incoherent (at least to me) explanations that you should go and poke with Grub to get things right, but i couldn’t get a comprehensive enough explanation that i would know exactly what i was doing. So i decided not to be bothered. And then i read in another article that thou shalst screw the latest version and just go with the previous one, and things are nice and fine. You should even be able to update to the latest version over the command line, so you’ll get virtual machine support and all the other goodies the 8.10 provides.
There are two implications. One: install 8.04 and you’re up and running before your coffee gets cold (even in a well ventilated server room), or two: if you know exactly how to actually get 8.10 up and running with the RAID discovered, please tell me in the comments. Thank you.
