Dell PowerEdge 1855

[Carl Makin]

Afternoon!

Just had more success with the Dell 1855.

I split the disks into two individual drives visible to the OS and am 
now getting much better results. Bonnie and iozone transfer rates to and 
from a single drive of 50 to 60MB/s. This obviously just confirms the 
previous emails regarding this particular card (LSILogic 1030 Ultra4 
Adapter) and the mpt driver.  I've CC'd Matt Jacob on this, Matt any ideas?

I also managed to get the CD rom drive working for the install.  The 
sequence is this;

. boot system with cd
. unplug usb cdrom drive when "waiting for 15 seconds" appears
. plug in the usb drive once sysinstall has started
. switch to the second virtual screen (alt-F2) and wait (approx 2 
minutes) until "cd0" appears
. switch back to sysinstall (alt-F1) and go to the "options" screen and 
reprobe the hardware
. install as normal

The boot sequence will hang if the USB drive is attached at boot.  There 
was something in freebsd-stable about a month ago about booting hanging 
if an ipod shuffle was attached.  This is showing exactly the same symptoms.

Otherwise the machine is running well.


Carl.