Dell 2950 & 1950

[Bill Moran]

Jay Chandler <chandler at chapman.edu> wrote:
>
> Bill Moran wrote:
> > In response to "Peter Grigor" <peter.grigor at gmail.com>:
> >   
> >> I've just gotten some quotes on a few dell machines and I was wondering now
> >> if freebsd 6.x is able to run on them properly. Perc/5i cards and 64-bit
> >> Intel chips are my worries :)
> >>
> >> Anyone have any experiences they'd like to share? Anyone successfully
> >> running mysql on an IA64 architecture with Freebsd?
> >>     
> >
> > We're in the early stages of deployment with these.  None of them are
> > actually in production yet, but we're in the final stages of putting
> > them there.
> >
> > 6.1 doesn't work with the onboard NICS -- you have to get a 6.2-RC
> > or wait for 6.2.  Otherwise, everything 64-bit works as far as we
> > can tell.  We're a little grumpy that we don't have any way to
> > monitor the RAID (our Dell x850 systems use megarc to automatically
> > signal us if a drive fails)  We've also had occasional problems
> > with the reboot and shutdown commands not completing, but it's been
> > so intermittent that we can't seem to isolate the cause.  Symptom
> > is that it gets to the final stage of reboot/shutdown and then waits
> > indefinitely without issuing the final ACPI command.
> >
> > Do some searches on my name and/or those topics on the stable@
> > list archives for more details.
> >
> Running the same 1950 platform here with the i386 base-- I've seen the
> same problems you mention.  The onboard NIC worked intermittently, but
> kept crashing, so was replaced with an Intel NIC.  I just placed an
> order for 7 more, and made sure to get the Intel onboard NIC option.
> Restarting is buggy as well, with the same symptoms.  My (inelegant)
> solution is to install a pair of ethernet managed power strips, so I can
> kill power remotely to bring it all the way down if need be.

We get all our units with Dell's remote access card installed.  It
gives us the same kind of remote admin -- equivalent to being able to
hit the power button from the other side of the planet.

> What advantages/disadvantages do you see with running the 64 bit
> architecture?  I must confess, it never occured to me to try that...
> I'm running the Dual Core Xeon processors, if that helps anything.

In our case, we're primarily concerned about RAM.  These units are starting
out with 4G, and we're monitoring them so we can add RAM when the usage
goes up.  amd64 is obviously going to be better supported going forward
than PAE.

-Bill