NAS advice?

[DAve]

Brian A. Seklecki wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Feb 2006, DAve wrote:
> 
>> (I am cross posting to FreeBSD questions and Bacula Users, I will not 
>> be cross posting replies)
>>
>> I've been crying for four years that we needed a decent backup system 
>> and I always got put off. "It's on order", "can you resubmit an 
>> updated equipment list". Yea, checks in the mail.
>>
>> So yesterday I am told that we have some equipment we got in another 
>> deal and I can have it to backup my NOC. I plan to run Bacula which I 
>> already have on some individual machines. I want to have Bacula 
>> clients on all my machines talking to a single machine running the 
>> Bacula director, hopefully using the NAS machines for storage.
>>
>> This is the equipment they threw at me, it is old, but amazingly, unused.
>>
>> One Dell Poweredge 750, 2.8ghz CPU, 1gb ram, 2 500gb SATA Maxtor 
>> drives(yuk!), CERC SATA controller.
> 
> 
> Be very careful here.  I run OpenBSD with CMU RAIDFrame RAID-1 mirrors 
> and FreeBSD 5.3 with GEOM/GMirror RAID-1 on this platform for embeded 
> devices. It's rock-solid, except Dell phased the 750 for the 850 and 
> went from ICH6 to ICH7 Intel Chipsets?  Also, they're now OEM'ing 
> Broadcom bge(4) based NICs instead of Intel em(4), so consider yourself 
> lucky in a sense >:}. The point is that the 850 will only run the very 
> latest FreeBSD 6.1-BETA1 snapshots contain support for the newer chips.
> 
> ~lava

Ahh, so they will be fully supported chipsets and on the way to legacy 
by them time I am allowed to purchase new equipment again ;^).

Thanks for the heads up, good to know if I come by an 850 for a client's 
colo box. I've been getting PE2650's, at least the last two I converted 
to FreeBSD webservers were. They work beautifully BTW.

DAve