From owner-freebsd-stable Mon Jun 26 4:29:38 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from morpheus.skynet.be (morpheus.skynet.be [195.238.2.39]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1E86537BBAA for ; Mon, 26 Jun 2000 04:29:33 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from blk@skynet.be) Received: from [195.238.1.121] (brad.techos.skynet.be [195.238.1.121]) by morpheus.skynet.be (Postfix) with ESMTP id 43281DBB9; Mon, 26 Jun 2000 13:29:27 +0200 (MET DST) Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: blk@pop.skynet.be Message-Id: In-Reply-To: References: Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2000 13:24:20 +0200 To: Matt Heckaman , FreeBSD-STABLE From: Brad Knowles Subject: Re: Compatibility Question Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG At 5:56 AM -0400 2000/6/26, Matt Heckaman wrote: > I've got a chance here to pick up a new Dell Poweredge 1300 for a very > good price and I'm wondering if I will have any problems running FreeBSD > on it, I'd like to hear of any pitfalls and so fourth before I commit to > it, obviously :) I have no problems on the Dell PowerEdge 1300 that is our primary news peering server running FreeBSD 3.4-RELEASE (and in the Freenix Top 100), nor on the new news spool server I am building (running FreeBSD 4.0-STABLE), nor have I had any problems on any other Dell machines (I've got a couple of PowerEdge 2450s that I'm building as news reader servers, with FreeBSD 4.0-STABLE). > PIII 550 (dual) > 64MB ECC SDRAM (this will be replaced since I need about 512M of ram and > can't afford to/don't find I need to buy half a gig of ECC ram) > 9.1GB LVD SCSI 7200rpm 1" HDD > Intel Pro 100+ It's been my experience that when you start talking about significant amounts of RAM (anything over 128-256MB), you really, *really*, *REALLY* want to be using ECC. You can't imagine the amount of pain and hassle that will be caused for you when you run into frequent hard-to-diagnose system crashes, and you can't begin to estimate the amount of time and money it will cost you to try to track down problems like this. Depending on what you're doing, how much down time results, how much your time costs per hour, and how much work is lost by all your customers, a single crash could cost you more than the ECC RAM that could have prevented that crash. That said, this has nothing to do with Dell PowerEdge servers per se, just that they allow you to use ECC RAM, and that I'd strongly encourage you to reconsider this decision. Other than that, the Dell machines should work for you just fine -- certainly no worse than any other systems I know of, and better than most. -- These are my opinions -- not to be taken as official Skynet policy ====================================================================== Brad Knowles, || Belgacom Skynet SA/NV Systems Architect, Mail/News/FTP/Proxy Admin || Rue Colonel Bourg, 124 Phone/Fax: +32-2-706.13.11/12.49 || B-1140 Brussels http://www.skynet.be || Belgium To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message