This might make it yet into some FAQ... :-/ K Kadow wrote on Mon, Oct 23, 2006 at 08:47:06PM -0500: > I've inherited a half dozen Dell PowerEdge 2650s with the PERC 3/Di > Adaptec RAID controllers, mostly running old OpenBSD with the 'aac' > RAID controller enabled. > > I'd like to put as little money (and time) into these as possible > while still bringing them up to the latest supported OpenBSD release, > and keeping the Dell support contracts in place. I'm willing to > consider trading these in, but I don't see affordable rackmount > servers from Dell or Sun with redundant power and hardware RAID. > > These servers have been up and running for years (as in 1000 day > uptimes) without major issues, and with no complaints about > performance or corruption. How big a risk am I taking by reinstalling > these machines with 4.0 and a custom 'aac' kernel?
If something works for you that doesn't work for others and cannot even be expected to work due to known bugs, chances are you use it in some special way that exposes problems less than they use to be exposed in more usual contexts. Such things can depend on gory details. You *know* bugs are there, you *know* they will not go away with OpenBSD 4.0, but you do *not* know why they do not bite you, or why you did not yet realize being bitten. If you change any detail of the (apparently) working system, i suspect nobody can tell you for sure whether that will improve or break things in that particular situation, even if the changes you apply are usually an excellent idea and make every typical system better. I do not say your system will break if you upgrade to 4.0. But who knows? Things have been changed (i.e. improved, of course) during the last few years, also in aac(4), but all we know for sure is that both the firmware and the driver for this cards is still buggy. What if by some ill chance any of the improvements change the special conditions that caused you not be hurt so far? If those servers are in any way mission-critical for you (i.e. if sudden failure would cause you relevant inconvenience) you should seriously consider getting better hardware, even if you have to pay for it. If those servers need to be exposed to the internet, i would also strongly suggest getting better hardware. Internet servers need to be kept up to date, and you never know how long your luck with "works for me" will last. Any update will make you hold your breath. For example, with an Adaptec 2410SA it once happened to me that a newer firmware gave me *much* more failures than an older one, see the archives. If those servers are neither mission-critical nor exposed to the internet, maybe you can just isolate them in a dedicated network segment, protect them by a firwall and make sure nobody comes near who could attack them, even if the OS and applications are not up to date and contain well-known flaws. This is one of the rare situations where the (with respect to operating system updates almost always bad) attitude "never change a running system" might actually make some sense - yet it depends on what you are using this stuff for... Sorry, i cannot comment on your remaining questions, i only suffered from Adaptec RAID, but do not know DELL server hardware.
