• Main difference is that the OS system disk is provided by two SSDs attached to the mainboard SATA interface rather than through the RAID card.
• To install, boot the flexbuff and after the megaRAID configuration is complete, enter the “INTEL STORAGE TECHNOLOGY” bios with “ctrl-i”. From there, unselect the drives from their currrent RAID-1 configuration (as this is not visible to the debian installer). Then reboot
• For VBS recordings, please ensure that the JBOD configuration is selected in the megaRAID controller as the default setting for unconfigured good drives, and that any existing RAID configurations are removed.
• When installing debian (stretch), if you need to create a new partition table for the OS disks do not use GPT - this (when combined with RAID) is incompatible with setting the bootable flag and/or installing grub. Use a DOS partition table, mark as for linux RAID & bootable, install the OS to the software RAID and install grub to one or both SSDs.
• In the main BIOS, make sure that the HDD boot priority is set to use the SSDs rather than the megaRAID drives.
• After installing debian, edit /etc/apt/sources.list to use “main contrib non-free” sources throughout. Run apt-get update and then apt-get install emacs nfs-kernel-server tightvncserver libfftw3-dev python iftop iotop wireshark make automake build-essential gfortran x11vnc nfs-kernel-server nfs-common gparted pkg-config g++ gfortran bison flex libexpat1-dev fftw3-dev autoconf automake libtool build-essential pgplot5 subversion libopenmpi-dev openmpi-bin rpcbind ethtool libpng-dev
• This should build in the pre-requisites for DiFX, fourfit, jive5ab, etc.

• Edit the /etc/sysctl.conf file to add in the following lines

 net.core.wmem_max=201326592
net.core.rmem_max=1073741824
net.ipv4.conf.all.arp_filter = 1
net.core.netdev_max_backlog = 20971752
net.ipv4.udp_mem = "65536 131072 262144"
net.core.optmem_max = 50331648 
vfs_cache_pressure = 50
vm.min_free_kbytes = 1048576
kernel.perf_event_max_sample_rate=10000