I have been in the process of configuring GeoServer 2.0.0 to serve SRTM30 data. I downloaded this from
http://dds.cr.usgs.gov/srtm/version2_1/SRTM30/, and converted all the dem files to geotiffs. I then created a new GeoServer layer using the Image mosaicking plugin. This worked Great!
The issue I am having seems to occur as you zoom in, causing some interpolation to occur on the data. for some reason, the 1st two scan lines of a generated tif file are zeroed out. EQ, I was testing a number of requests near Colorado. Mostly because I know the elevation data should be at least 1400 meters, so getting anything outside that range would indicate something unusual. Up to a certain zoom level, all is well, but when one goes beyond that zoom level, all of the generated files have 0 values for the 1st two scan lines in the file.
See attached file for as an example.
0415_0240.tif