Anthony's drive issues.Re: ssh password delay

[Anthony Atkielski]

Jerry Bell writes:

> You're looking for the reason that your older hardware runs on NT and
> doesn't run on FreeBSD.  Save any real hardware problem, the reason is
> most certainly pure incompatibility between the hardware and the drivers
> that are in FreeBSD.

No doubt.

> When someone goes to write a driver (unless it's provided by the
> manufacturer, which I don't think is all that common) for a piece of
> hardware, they have a piece of hardware and some docs on how to interface
> with it.  If the firmware on the board they are using is later than yours,
> and is incompatible in some slight way that the driver author took
> advantage of, you see this exact problem.  The driver authors ask for
> people to test the drivers out - but if no one who is willing/ready/able
> to test is running an older firmware rev, then the testing doesn't extend
> back to your version and it's not found to be a problem until someone like
> you comes along and trips over an incompatibility.  I've had this very
> thing happen for several different older raid cards.  In every case, I
> fixed the problem by upgrading the firmware.

If someone wants me to test a different driver on the machine, I can do
that; it's a test machine.  I have all the source on the machine and can
rebuild stuff.

> Alternatively, you can try linux.  They tend to support all sorts of crazy
> hardware versions.

Mandrake Linux wouldn't even install.

There's a second problem with this machine: I can't get it to boot from
disk.  It booted fine under NT, but it won't boot FreeBSD on its own,
nor was it willing to boot Mandrake Linux.

Strangely, the little boot program that I installed with boot0cfg (I
think) does boot up, but when I try to choose the FreeBSD slice to boot
into FreeBSD, the machine just stalls.

The only way I can boot right now is from diskette.  I enter the loader
after waiting 10 minutes for the diskette boot to proceed, then I change
the current device, unload the kernel, and boot again, and the machine
instantly boots from the hard disk and comes up.  Now if I could just
get the machine to do that on its own ...

-- 
Anthony