From owner-freebsd-isp Fri Jul 28 6:14:36 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Received: from Samizdat.uucom.com (samizdat.uucom.com [198.202.217.54]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 519C937BB89 for ; Fri, 28 Jul 2000 06:14:32 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from cshenton@uucom.com) Received: (from cshenton@localhost) by Samizdat.uucom.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id JAA01825; Fri, 28 Jul 2000 09:14:27 -0400 (EDT) To: James Wyatt Cc: Shawn Kelly , mjy@geizhals.at, freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Reliable rackmount servers? References: From: Chris Shenton Date: 28 Jul 2000 09:14:27 -0400 In-Reply-To: James Wyatt's message of "Thu, 27 Jul 2000 12:36:16 -0500 (CDT)" Message-ID: Lines: 44 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0807 (Gnus v5.8.7) Emacs/20.7 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: owner-freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Thu, 27 Jul 2000 12:36:16 -0500 (CDT), James Wyatt said: James> As usual, more recent experience is usually a better than less James> recent. Good point, my compaq-near-death experience :-) was over two years ago. James> Hardware compatability usually gets way better over time and James> onboard stuff for servers frequently leads available Unix James> drivers a little. But Compaq *always* adds "proprietary" hardware to their boxes. Even the mainstream WinDoze vendors software for Compaq lags what's available on other boxes with documented commodity hardware. (by commodity I don't mean "cheap", but well known, like Adaptec, Intel Ether, etc). If the big boyz can't get docs from compaq quickly, then the free software folks will be even more delayed. So, yeah, FreeBSD will (eventually) run on whatever Compaq sells, but time to support the proprietary HW will lag support on non-proprietary boxes. (IMHO you should not have to use some "special" vendor software which only runs on one OS when you want to change your RAM size; that's lame.) James> If you are a 'Compaq shop', take a machine you have there and James> try installing on it. Change the DRAM and add a drive to prove James> you can and try banging on it. Definitely a good idea. If the HW you *have* runs FreeBSD fine, then use it. But be cautious if you buy *new* hardware -- ensure that you can run FreeBSD on it before buying it. James> FBSD will likely easily prove you can get more performance out James> of your hardware. Oh, yeah -- definitely. I'm quite amused to run a couple ISPs on HW which most WinDoze users wouldn't even have on their desktop "because it's too slow". WinBloat. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message