Date: Thu, 05 Aug 2004 02:31:47 -0700 From: Daniel Rudy <dr2867@pacbell.net> To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Now here's something for FreeBSD advocacy Message-ID: <4111FE83.9090602@pacbell.net>
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FreeBSD does it again. I'm taking an older computer and making it into a lightweight server for various uses. Things like usenet, email, ftp, and web. The motherboard is a FIC VA-503+ v1.2. The CPU is a AMD K6-2 at 500MHz and 128MB Ram. It has a 13.6GB primary harddisk as well. All of this is in a full tower AT case with a 300W power supply. For my personal use, it's a decent system. Oh, and I'm using FreeBSD 4.10R. Well, for the server functions, I needed to add another harddisk into the system. I went out and got a Maxtor 80GB harddisk and installed it into the system. Then I went into the BIOS to tell the computer about the harddisk, and when the BIOS tried to calculate the size of the disk, it would hang the system. I couldn't even boot. So, I set the drive type to NONE, and let the system boot up into FreeBSD. I was going to take the computer back apart and install a special IDE controller card that I had laying around for just this type of incident. On the kernel boot, guess what I saw...My new harddisk. I was stunned. After I recovered from my shock, I started up sysinstall. It took the fdisk, disk label, and newfs with no complaints. I added the entry to /etc/fstab and then rebooted. Drive is still there and mounted, ready for use. Using an older motherboard (AT form factor (not ATX) made in 2000) which there are no more BIOS updates being made (Last one is in the ROM), with a newer harddisk that the BIOS crashed when it tried to probe it, FreeBSD took the drive directly at the hardware level and used it with no problems. Kudos to the FreeBSD development teams. -- Daniel Rudy
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