Re: It ain't quick, but it's sure fun
Rogier Krieger wrote: We recently deployed a new fileserver:) Most surprising thing was that it recognised a 250 GByte HDD at the first go, without real effort. Yes, I've been pleasantly surprised about how well big drives work on old machines. I've been assured that this is ok by people who know...and my testing has been pretty abusive. Giving up on the BIOS built-in LANdesk 0.99 PXEboot was a little harder, but the machine is a wee bit beyond its supported life cycle. If that's on the fxp card/chip, you might have luck downloading and updating the boot ROMs. I did eventually find an Intel download which works on most of my fxp cards with the 0.99 PXE stuff. For those interested; it's a WinNET II 5BLIP board that will primarily route a few packets on a cable modem uplink. Thanks for making this work so painlessly. Cheers, Rogier OpenBSD 3.8 (GENERIC) #0: Thu Oct 6 16:03:07 CEST 2005 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC cpu0: Cyrix 6x86 (486-class) real mem = 31825920 (31080K) avail mem = 21037056 (20544K) ... wdc0 at isa0 port 0x1f0/8 irq 14 wd0 at wdc0 channel 0 drive 0: HDS722525VLAT80 wd0: 16-sector PIO, LBA48, 238475MB, 488397168 sectors yikes. Um...be really careful with this. If that 250G drive is just because it is what you had around, and you created the minimal partitions you needed, no problem, but if you used the I have the disk, I'm going to allocate the whole thing, dang it! philosophy, you may be in for trouble if you have to fsck the thing. Typically, around 1M of RAM is required to fsck 1G of disk. You can use a swap partition (NOT a swap file, as that isn't activated yet), but that's slow. But yes...fun. :) Nick.
Re: It ain't quick, but it's sure fun
On 10/7/05, Nick Holland [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Rogier Krieger wrote: Somehow, I expected you'd reply :) Giving up on the BIOS built-in LANdesk 0.99 PXEboot was a little harder, but the machine is a wee bit beyond its supported life cycle. If that's on the fxp card/chip, you might have luck downloading and updating the boot ROMs. I did eventually find an Intel download which works on most of my fxp cards with the 0.99 PXE stuff. I'm not sure yet whether the PXE lives on the card or within the BIOS. So far, the only way to get to the PXE was through enabling Boot from LAN first, although I do not find it entirely conclusive. The Realtek card is just the first piece we found lying around to put in the spare (and only) PCI slot. The fxp is integrated on the board. I saw several posts in the misc@ archives detailing problems with the 0.99 revision. I'll dig around the Intel jungle to see what I can find and report on success/failure. Typically, around 1M of RAM is required to fsck 1G of disk. You can use a swap partition (NOT a swap file, as that isn't activated yet), but that's slow. I know; I created wd0a to fit well within the 504M limit as listed in the FAQ. There also is a ~900M swap partition to deal with the ~200G data partition. That said, let's say I place a good deal of faith in the machine's uptime potential to not need to fsck. Also, fsck shouldn't be too fast: otherwise my 9k6 serial console may fall behind :) But yes...fun. :) Indeed; a perfect tinkering thing for a Friday afternoon. Cheers, Rogier -- If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there.
