shopping for a new server

[Maxim Khitrov]

On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 12:45 PM, Tim Kellers <timothyk at wallnet.com> wrote:
> Dell 2500 from 10 years back is soon to be very dead in the machine room at
> work.  I'm thinking about replacing it with a Rack mount Dell R610  has
> anyone used that and has compatibility issues or successes?  I'll be using a
> RAID 5 setup and PERC version is up to 6i in this box, any issues with this
> PERC?  The specs indicate R610 will way outperform the old 2500.  The 2500
> currently supports mail (sendmail), web, db (pgsql and mysql), samba, etc.
>
> I Googled and found a bunch of somewhat older posts that showed some NIC
> issues and some PERC issues but it looked like most issues had been
> corrected by the beginning of 2011.  Does anyone have any recent
> duccess/failure stories?
>
> I'd probably be looking to run 8.2 RELEASE AMD or 9.0 AMD when it becomes
> release.
>
> Thanks
>
> Tim

I'm currently configuring FreeBSD 8.2 amd64 on an R610 with PERC H700
RAID controller. H700 uses the mfi(4) driver, I think that also goes
for PERC 6/I. Network uses the bce(4) driver. No real problems to
report.

One minor issue I ran into is that disabling serial ports in BIOS
causes FreeBSD to freeze when booting. The solution is simply to set
serial ports to be "On without Console Redirection." You should also
leave Intel I/OAT disabled, since FreeBSD has no support for it.

- Max