Recommendations, redux

[Adriaan de Groot]

What with all the recommendations threads going on recently, I've gone and 
mislaid the URL to the page that's collecting them. Could someone refresh my 
memory? See, I'm now suddenly in the position to have to shop for a server 
(and that means figuring out what I _want_, anyway), and I find myself in 
unfamiliar territory.

Desktops are fairly straightfoward, I think: Via KT800 chipset and all is 
fine; both my Asus K8V-SE Deluxe and Gigabyte Ga-K8VT800 work out of the box, 
including RAID mirroring on the Via 82xx controller (both boards) or the 
Promise controller in the K8V-SE. Fill two of the 3 DIMM slots with decent 
RAM and you're off.

Servers, well, I'm out of my depth there. Consider SATA-RAID (I'm still a 
sucker for non-SCSI solutions). From Scott Long's message of apr. 19th, I 
can't tell if the Adaptec 2410SA is supported .. er, the hardware notes say 
it uses aac(4) which is safe. Spectacularly much cheaper are things like 
HighPoint Rocket RAID and Promise FastTrak (There's the difference in PCI bus 
to take into account there, to account for the price difference). Neither are 
mentioned on the hardware notes page. Neither is Silicon Image stuff, like 
the 3112 (used in some Intel SATA-RAID cards). Oddly enough, local retailers 
list FreeBSD as a supported OS for the HighPoint -- I guess that's just i386 
then (confirmed by the i386 HW notes).

At the risk of becoming _too_ specific, can anyone recommend a retailer for 
dual opteron systems in the Benelux? One who might understand the notion of 
running FBSD on such a machine? Most of the server retailers I can find 
online just push HP or IBM boxes with precious little information about 
what's inside the box or what works.

-- 
These are your friends - Adem
    GPG: FEA2 A3FE Adriaan de Groot