Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 16:11:27 -0800 From: Brian Myers <tarkawebfoot@charter.net> To: freebsd-amd64@freebsd.org Subject: New board for a newbie Message-ID: <5B1511FA-5540-11D9-AF1F-000A95B96642@charter.net>
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Hi all, I've decided to get my first dual processor system, and would like to do a dual Opteron. I've run FreeBSD before and had mixed results with it. Everything ran well for a long time; the only trouble I had was upgrading software. I am a competent developer, but not a Unix guru. Eventually the port upgrade process broke and I couldn't upgrade ports any more, and the problems were way too complicated for me to figure out. This is really bad since I have a production web site running on this machine. I was, however, really impressed by the fact that that box is so rock stable. The ports broke about 2 years ago and that box is still running strong today (FreeBSD 4.4). This year I purchased my first Mac and have been impressed in a big way with Mac OS/X. I've gotten almost all of the open source software I use installed on Darwin thru DarwinPorts which works much like FreeBSD ports. I also am stronger in my understanding of Unix, so I'm thinking about giving FreeBSD another try. I'm definitely going with a 64 bit OS, so it's either FreeBSD AMD-64, or Debian - AMD 64. So I have two questions for the list members here: 1) What do you see as the pros/cons of FreeBSD AMD-64 over Debian for a dual Opteron system? and 2) I've seen much conversation on which boards, memory, and SATA controllers were supported by FreeBSD. So much so that I have no idea what the current state of things is. So, if you were building a new dual Opteron from scratch, what would you get? For cost reasons, I'm going with 1.8 ghz processors and probably only 2GB of ram. I'll have two RAID 1 SATA hard drives, but should I use an onboard controller, or purchase a separate controller? Note that I may at some point upgrade to 4 RAID 0+1 disks. What about video cards? I don't need much so, are the onboard ones useable or not? Also, I, of course, would like the onboard LAN controller to be supported. Hope this generates some interesting conversation. Thanx to anyone who answers, Brian
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