[Sysadmin] Serious, egregious problem with Servermatrix Debian boxes

[John Handelaar]

Hey, guess what?

1. They don't bother to compile proper IDE support into
   the kernel.

2. DMA on the IDE interface is therefore off.

3. DMA on the IDE interface cannot therefore be enabled.

4. DMA on the IDE interface is in fact also disabled at the
   BIOS level.


Ergo...

5. The disk channel is running at about 10% of normal
   performance

6. The split second we ever hit swap space, all the meters
   go up to 100% usage and the box drops dead until you
   kill almost all its running processes.


Also FYI

7. Servermatrix's tech support has no idea what any of this
   means.


Seb and I have just wasted three weeks of our lives trying to
figure out why a Zope application wasn't working, and it turns
out that this is the culprit.   Anyone here have some extreme
kernel-fu?  Our box needs patching, and so does mine (I've now
had two failed attempts to sort it out result in total server
non-boot failure).

jh