Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2000 10:01:53 -0500 (CDT) From: Chris Dillon <cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us> To: Chris Shenton <cshenton@uucom.com> Cc: James Wyatt <jwyatt@rwsystems.net>, Shawn Kelly <kellysm_2k@yahoo.com>, mjy@geizhals.at, freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Reliable rackmount servers? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0007280927520.83661-100000@mail.wolves.k12.mo.us> In-Reply-To: <lfya2ml7m4.fsf@Samizdat.uucom.com>
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On 28 Jul 2000, Chris Shenton wrote: > On Thu, 27 Jul 2000 12:36:16 -0500 (CDT), James Wyatt > <jwyatt@rwsystems.net> said: > > James> As usual, more recent experience is usually a better than less > James> recent. > > Good point, my compaq-near-death experience :-) was over two years > ago. > > > James> Hardware compatability usually gets way better over time and > James> onboard stuff for servers frequently leads available Unix > James> drivers a little. > > But Compaq *always* adds "proprietary" hardware to their boxes. > Even the mainstream WinDoze vendors software for Compaq lags > what's available on other boxes with documented commodity > hardware. (by commodity I don't mean "cheap", but well known, like > Adaptec, Intel Ether, etc). Always? No more than any other server vendor, from what I've seen. I'm using FreeBSD on several Compaq servers new and old without any problems. They're using pretty standard stuff as far as I can tell. Symbios/NCR SCSI controllers, Intel NICs (or Lance stuff on the older ones), etc. Nothing that any other server vendor couldn't choose to put in their servers as well (and many do). Proprietary, after all, means it would be specific to just that vendor. Sure, you probably won't ever get that nifty LCD panel on the front of the box to work if you have one, but who cares? Its presence doesn't prevent the box from working with FreeBSD. > If the big boyz can't get docs from compaq quickly, then the free > software folks will be even more delayed. So, yeah, FreeBSD will > (eventually) run on whatever Compaq sells, but time to support the > proprietary HW will lag support on non-proprietary boxes. It seems that Compaq is just as willing to release programming information for their various pieces of "proprietary" hardware these days as is anybody else. That isn't always saying much, but we do support their RAID controllers, which is about the only piece of "proprietary" hardware I can find on any of their servers, and it is an entirely optional piece of hardware as well. I'm not so sure anybody cares about that LCD panel (which is optional too). :-) > (IMHO you should not have to use some "special" vendor software > which only runs on one OS when you want to change your RAM size; > that's lame.) All you ever needed was either to install the system partition with the utilities there, or use the configuration flopp(y|ies). Using some utility with Windows was _never_ a requirement. -- Chris Dillon - cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us - cdillon@inter-linc.net FreeBSD: The fastest and most stable server OS on the planet. For Intel x86 and Alpha architectures. ( http://www.freebsd.org ) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
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