From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Jun 20 12:52:24 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from rwcrmhc51.attbi.com (rwcrmhc51.attbi.com [204.127.198.38]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B2AFC37B406 for ; Thu, 20 Jun 2002 12:52:18 -0700 (PDT) Received: from bmah.dyndns.org ([12.233.149.189]) by rwcrmhc51.attbi.com (InterMail vM.4.01.03.27 201-229-121-127-20010626) with ESMTP id <20020620195218.UDOU11426.rwcrmhc51.attbi.com@bmah.dyndns.org>; Thu, 20 Jun 2002 19:52:18 +0000 Received: from intruder.bmah.org (localhost [IPv6:::1]) by bmah.dyndns.org (8.12.3/8.12.3) with ESMTP id g5KJqIkR006939; Thu, 20 Jun 2002 12:52:18 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from bmah@intruder.bmah.org) Received: (from bmah@localhost) by intruder.bmah.org (8.12.3/8.12.3/Submit) id g5KJqELQ006938; Thu, 20 Jun 2002 12:52:14 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from bmah) Message-Id: <200206201952.g5KJqELQ006938@intruder.bmah.org> X-Mailer: exmh version 2.5+ 20020506 with nmh-1.0.4 To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Cc: bmah@packetdesign.com, casner@packetdesign.com Subject: FreeBSD on a MaxAttach? From: bmah@packetdesign.com (Bruce A. Mah) Reply-To: bmah@packetdesign.com X-Face: g~c`.{#4q0"(V*b#g[i~rXgm*w;:nMfz%_RZLma)UgGN&=j`5vXoU^@n5v4:OO)c["!w)nD/!!~e4Sj7LiT'6*wZ83454H""lb{CC%T37O!!'S$S&D}sem7I[A 2V%N&+ X-Image-Url: http://www.employees.org/~bmah/Images/bmah-cisco-small.gif X-Url: http://www.employees.org/~bmah/ Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/signed; boundary="==_Exmh_-1928488758P"; micalg=pgp-sha1; protocol="application/pgp-signature" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2002 12:52:14 -0700 Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG --==_Exmh_-1928488758P Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sorry to interrupt various flamewars with some actual technical discussion... :-) At ${REALJOB}, we've got a couple of Maxtor MaxAttach boxes we're trying to play with. These are dedicated NFS/SMB servers. Physically they are 1U boxes with four 70GB IDE disks on them (wd0, wd1, wd2, wd3). They have Pentium (P55C) processors, 128MB of RAM, an on-board fxp device, no slots, and no removable media devices, all this on what appears to be a semi-custom motherboard. We managed to find a serial console with the help of a multimeter and an oscilloscope. The OS appears to be a stripped-down FreeBSD 3.X...they have some kind of concatenated disk driver that seems similar to ccd(4). For various reasons, we're trying to figure out how to get a stock FreeBSD 4-STABLE on them. We tossed in a scratch disk with 4.5-STABLE as the primary master disk; the machine wouldn't even give a loader prompt. We also tried booting with the existing wd0 and wd1, and our disk on the secondary master; we could boot, but got a kernel panic during an attempted boot to single-user mode...I suspect in the concatenated disk driver trying to do some consistency checking. I should mention that with all four of the original disks installed, it functions properly, if slowly, as an NFS server. We're trying not to wipe out the existing boot disk until we have at least a warm, furry feeling that this is going to work. We haven't gotten that yet. In theory we could put a populated obj/ tree on the existing disks and use this to do a installkernel/installworld, but this commits us to a course of action really early without an easy way to back out if something goes wrong (see last paragraph). Has anyone played around with one of these boxes? Thanks in advance! Bruce. PS. It's crossed my mind that the staff time involved in making this work could quickly exceed the cost of buying equivalent (maybe even better) "normal" hardware. :-) --==_Exmh_-1928488758P Content-Type: application/pgp-signature -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (FreeBSD) Comment: Exmh version 2.5+ 20020506 iD8DBQE9EjJu2MoxcVugUsMRAqhqAJ91kyvDsysZp3+Dh5iwsBhr9NzGTACgso9Q /e+5Eu9/NrqQZgELmD1ZClo= =CuUG -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --==_Exmh_-1928488758P-- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message