New Motherboard Fun…

I had a motherboard failure a couple of weeks ago in my CentOS server. I couldn’t get the same model to replace it, so ended up with an Asus P5Q board. Slotted in OK, but I then had all sorts of fun trying to get it running properly with CentOS 5.3. Issues being: Network card (onboard Atheros gigabit LAN), the Marvell chip that the PATA and secondary SATA hangs off, and the onboard sensors chip (temps etc).

With help from various sources, I got the NIC going (elrepo.com driver), and the sensors chip (elrepo.com and a later packaged version of lmsensors 3.x), but it’s still not ideal. The Marvell controller is inoperative, so no CDROM or secondary SATA, and the sensors chip is requiring me to run an out-of-centos-repo version of lm_sensors that means I can’t install net-snmp.

So I’m probably going to swap the motherboard with one from my desktop – it’s a P35 instead of the Asus’ P45 chipset. A trial run with a CentOS liveCD was positive, no major issues.

So if you have a P5Q and want to run CentOS 5.3, be prepared for some pain…