Where to find good/cheap tech support

[Joel]

>    You seem to be making assumptions and are looking into this to deeply
>    my friend. But thanks for the feedback anyway :)
>    -
>    The $150 was only an arbitrary number thats common in the field. I
>    could have chosen another number. It would not have mattered, the
>    question would have been the same.

You know, in the commercial side of free (as in speech) software,
support is where companies make their way. Expecting free service is a
little much, don't you think?

True, there is a lot of service-type activity that is available without
money (as in there ain't no such thing as a free lunch). But where value
is given, value is expected. If you have a bug in a driver, the author
expects you to work with him about it, not just say, "Hey! somebody fix
my machine. I'm sure it's the driver." Time is a precious commodity here
just like anywhere else, but so is help ferreting out bugs.

>    The SCSI adapter is an Adaptec Ultra320 built into a $3000+ 1U web
>    server and not a common inexpensive controller.

Putting that into perspective, a $3000 dollar 1U is not really an
expensive box. In fact, it's only the cost of one entry-level geek/month
in the US, two months for a young entry-level geek in Japan. And you're
going to expect at least two years' service out of that box, I assume.

But if you want near turnkey with the ability to install lots of
free/opensource stuff at that kind of price, Apple does pretty well.

> Since it works fine
>    for both RedHat and Windows we are probably going to go with another
>    OS on this server other than FreeBSD.

Your choice. That's part of the free as in speech business.

> Why arm wrestle the situation
>    when no one seems to know the solution to our issue.

Because if you go with MSWxxx, you get what you pay for -- nice warm
fuzzies and a server you have to make sure has the latest patches every
week if you want to keep those warm fuzzies very long.

If you go with Red Hat, you'll have something even better than warm
fuzzies. 

But you still should expect to invest time either way. If it were simple,
cheap, and trouble-free, everyone would be doing it, and there would be
no profit margin left.

>    And I am in a VERY small company that could barely pay for what we
>    just purchased.

I can sympathize. I recently made a trade-off decision between a Mac
Mini for my new weekend-warrior box and a cheap Sempron Pasokon Kobo box.
I went with the Sempron mostly for one reason, that I needed more
experience with the BSDs. I've got four OSses booting on it right now,
Fedora Core, openbsd, freebsd, and netbsd. Ran out of time to get Debian
loaded that weekend. 

When I bought it, I got a SCSI controller card and an ATA/IDE controller
card that I can't use yet. freebsd, netbsd, and openbsd recognize the
scsi card, I need to do some research on the Linux driver for it. I may
need to compile a custom Linux driver to get it running on Fedora Core.

openbsd sees the ATA/IDE card and it seems to work, but I'm not sure how
well. Hanging a drive on it changes the drive numbers (lousy ATA spec!)
so I'm going to have to edit /etc/fstab with the card out before booting
with the card in, which is going to be tricky with four OSses and
varying levels of support. As far as netbsd, freebsd, and Fedora Core go,
I expect to get the privilege of working with the driver authors if I
want that card to run. 

Both cards are cheap, less than USD 30 by the current exchange rate. The
value I get out of this is learning. When I bought the box, I knew I was
gambling on those two controllers. Neither Fedora Core nor freebsd even
see those controllers yet. That's more opportunities for me to do what I
bought the box for -- learn.

If I learn quickly enough, I show my employer, and maybe we get to bring
in new business, and maybe the company profits go up a bit, my wages
with them.

> We where lucky to get what we did and the idea of
>    having a duplicate is wishful thinking and not realistic, so thats a
>    risk we will have to take until we can afford better solutions. Its
>    not the perfect situation but its the best we can do with what we
>    have. I would love a new house but the cold numbers dictate what's
>    really possible right now.

I'm not going to tell you you were wrong (You were, but I won't tell you
that. ;-/) but now that you have it, you need to recognize two things:

One is that you're going to see downtime on that box, whatever system
you run on it. The other is that the direction you go now determines how
dependent you will be on some other company for keeping the downtime
short.

>    Now if your interested in the problem, here is the support
>    issue/question no one seems to have any clue about.....

There is a place to report bugs, and you've been told about a bug that
you have been told looks relevant. If you'd take a deep breath and
report the bug, you'd be doing the freebsd community a favor, you'd be
investing in freebsd in one of the ways that is recognized, and you
might be helping yourself to avoid depending on some other company to
tell you how long your downtime's going to be.

>    I am attempting to install FreeBSD 5.3 onto a new server, but during
>    the initial bootup it fails / times out from what I think is it trying
>    to initialize the SCSI adapter. The server has an Adaptec AIC-7902
>    dual-channel Ultra320 SCSI controller which the i386 ahd(4) driver has
>    listed as a supported device.

So it works for some people. Microsoft tells you to pay them lots of
money and asks you to test their hardware. You share the testing with
possibly hundreds of thousands of other customers, and there's an
advantage there. With freebsd, the number of people testing the driver
is likely to be in the hundreds. It's not surprising if your setup
reveals a bug that hasn't been seen yet, but if you work with the
driver author, you are likely to have it working fairly quickly.

>    I have been reading and searching this lists archives as well as the
>    bsdforums.org site for possible solutions, but so far what I have
>    found has not worked. I have tried disabling/enabling ACPI, removing
>    all but one SCSI drive and re-checking the adapter settings comparing
>    them to a different Adaptec controller on another server running
>    FreeBSD 5.3 which works fine. The servers BIOS and firmware is all up
>    to date and is mainly running on its default settings.

Different controller, different machine, probably a different driver.

>    Here is a summary of what I am seeing during bootup:
>    -
>    Ata1-master : FAILURE ATAPI_IDENTIFY timed out

Would ATAPI be SCSI? 

I wonder why that command timed out.

>    Waiting 15 seconds for SCSI devices to settle
>    -------Dump Card State Ends-------
>    (probe29:ahd1:0:15:0) SCB0xe timed out

I've seen unterminated SCSI controllers time out like this on freebsd.
Attach a terminated drive and for some reason they don't time out. 

>    ahd0: Issued Channel A Bus Reset 4 SCBs aborted
>    -
>    Any ideas?

Good question.

--
Joel Rees   <rees at ddcom.co.jp>
digitcom, inc.   株式会社デジコム
Kobe, Japan   +81-78-672-8800
** <http://www.ddcom.co.jp> **