Experience with DELL PowerEdge 2900

[Jerry McAllister]

On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 06:59:02PM +0100, Tobias Daub wrote:

> Hi There,
> 
> I'm pretty new to UNIX/FreeBSD and I'm going to install and administrate 
> FreeBSD on a DELL PowerEdge 2900.
> 
> Does anybody have experience with that machine, or are there any known 
> problems, for example:
> 
> - Perc RAID Controller
> - attaching an APC to the machine and configuring the corresponding software
> - ACPI

Should be no serious problem.   I have loaded up a few 2950-s, same
thing in a rack mount.   The only problem I had was figuring out
the device name for the disks.   

It has been more than a year, so my memory is fogging a little.  
But, it seems like dmesg showed both the individual disk devices
and the raid device and you could address them either way and I
errantly addressed the disk instead of the raid when I first tried
to do something with them.  Once I figured out what was happening
by studying the dmesg more carefully, all was well.

The only other thing is  that the DRAC is less than hoped for if you
got it with one.  It really wants to live in MS land and seems to want
for security.  It was like the people building those DRACs have never
heard of anything but MS 'networking' stuff, barely know that the 
internet exists or that wide open, non-protected connections in to the
heart of your system might actually be attacked by some unfriendly entity.  
I have heard that the code for them has been updated a few times, so it 
might be a little better, but I won't hold my breath.

Anyway, the DRACs don't affect the operation of the rest of the machine
as long as you leave them unplugged from the net.

So, 2900 should run FreeBSD just fine.

////jerry   

> 
> Thanks alot!
> Tobias
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