HP or Compaq servers.

[Will Saxon]

Gregory,

We have a lot of their machines, and have been happy with them. While we are still primarily a Microsoft shop, we do have one DL360G3 running 5.1-RELEASE without difficulty. We also have another just like that one running Slackware something.

We are using 2 36GB drives in a 'raid-0' stripeset off the built in Smart Array 5i+ controller. The machine has dual Xeon 3.06GHz processors and 2GB of ram. We have not had any problems with the integrated Broadcom ethernet controllers (bge driver). Everything is detected and works great.

I only have 2 complaints:

One is that the keyboard port doesnt seem to work with our KVM solution (a raritan paragon). The dongle we tried gets power from the keyboard port and that works since we can get video. However, we did not get any feedback from the keyboard. Plugging a keyboard directly into the machine works fine and using the dongle on another machine with the same keyboard works. We have seen this on both of the DL360G3's we have.

The other issue is that there is no health monitoring driver for FreeBSD yet. My understanding is that one is in development and near completion. This would be a good thing - making world typically kicks the fans into high speed, and the only way to quiet them back down is to reboot the machine. I added CPU_SUSP_HLT to the kernel on that machine and it seems to get noisy less often. When the fans go into high speed mode they are pretty loud.

Other than those two things, they are good machines that seem to work just fine with FreeBSD. 

-Will

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Grzegorz Czaplinski [mailto:G.Czaplinski at prioris.mini.pw.edu.pl]
> Sent: Monday, July 14, 2003 9:37 AM
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: HP or Compaq servers.
> 
> 
> Hi there!
> Does anyone can recommend an HP or Compaq server from the most recent
> line? Any experience with those systems? Problems?
> 
> I need to get two servers and HP, Comapq seems to be the only 
> option on
> the market for me.
> 
> Do we have any webpage with hardware configuration for FreeBSD?
> 
> Your help will be great!
> 
> Cheers,
> 	gregory
> --
> Grzegorz Czaplinski <gregory at prioris.mini.pw.edu.pl>
> "The Power to Serve, Right for the Power Users!" - 
> http://www.FreeBSD.org/
>  Fingerprint: EB77 E19D CFA2 5736 810F  847C A70F A275 2489 469F
>