Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 13:13:57 -0500 From: jmc <jcagle@gmail.com> To: "Michael Vince" <mv@thebeastie.org> Cc: freebsd-proliant@freebsd.org, freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: DL 380/G5 with 16G of ram Message-ID: <6863f0c90609081113l4fc19057m4857a1bc8719583b@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <4500F627.1040104@thebeastie.org> References: <45008628.2000007@juniper.net> <4500F627.1040104@thebeastie.org>
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On 9/7/06, Michael Vince <mv@thebeastie.org> wrote: > > <snip> > I have been doing all this while being on the other side of the world. > The other problem is the remote serial support via tip for reaching into > the bios is quite stuffed, all the text garbles into a single line and > is just to hard to read, I hacked the minicom port to use the USB to > 9pin serial device to see if I could make it more like how people in > linux would use it and it made little difference. > It looks like HP were trying to have better remote serial bios support > by going really basic command line style for remote BIOS control but its > no good. > The Dell bios is all nice and menu'ed and works flawlessly over remote > serial, no garbledness overwriting other text. The BIOS Serial Console (BSC) support should work fine and give you a nice menu to configure the BIOS. The factory default for BSC is auto-detect, which means it checks for a terminal attached to the serial port before enabling it. The default terminal setting is VT100. This can be changed to ANSI in the BIOS setup screens. Have you tried using a different terminal emulator to make your connection to the BIOS? I prefer C-Kermit over minicom. I gave up trying to do anything via the bios and aimed ta PXE remote > install, this worked after a total of 5 hours. > It kept dieing out during the install, I finally got it right once. > > Once I booted in a fresh FreeBSD 6.1-Release AMD64 install the 'bce' > ether device kept dieing and timing out, looking back I have no idea how > I managed to get a complete PXE remote install in the first place. > > I managed to cvsup and build a new kernel under 6-stable after about 15 > reboots. > > After a new kernel its been quite stable, but I originally wanted to > just stick with Release. > > There is no IPMI with HP even though it appears to be standard on most > other x86 servers. On the new Dell they now have IPMI v2, and I can use > a native FreeBSD IPMI client port for remote control. On HP it appears I > have to pay for some kind of LO software, this might be the reason for > useless uncontrollable remote 9pin serial for BIOS access. Your server has a very powerful BMC called iLO. One key feature of iLO is its support for a Virtual Serial Port (VSP). This allows you to SSH into iLO and access a serial console (COM2 by default on the DL380). The BIOS config menu can change this to COM1 if you want to. Here is a link to a document showing how to utilize VSP. http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00263709/c00263709.pdf iLO also gives you a SMASH compatible command line to manage the server. SMASH is a new DMTF standard alternative to IPMI. I gave a simple test on the bce with stable kernel compared to the Dells > with the em nics and it compared quite well but still slower then the > Dells. > Also note all the Dells are 6.1-Release a lot of posts have come up > lately saying the em is now even faster in stable compared to > 6.1-Release since the new driver updates, but considering I am getting > 97megs/sec via a simple nc test I don't think could/need to go faster. > > Em Dell to Em Dell > dell1# cat /dev/zero | dd bs=1m | nc dell2 3000 > ^C0+18456 records in > 0+18455 records out > 1209466880 bytes transferred in 12.459299 secs (97,073,429 bytes/sec) > > Bce HP to Em Dell > HPDL380# cat /dev/zero | dd bs=1m | nc dell2 3000 > ^C0+19648 records in > 0+19648 records out > 1287606272 bytes transferred in 13.926151 secs (92,459,594 bytes/sec) > > Mike > > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-proliant@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-proliant > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-proliant-unsubscribe@freebsd.org > " >
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