[geeks] In which 3Ware can bite me

[Phil Stracchino]

nate at portents.com wrote:
>> And forgot to ask ... can anyone here with first-hand experience offer
> 
> Can't offer first-hand experience, but can offer what is probably a good
> suggestion...
> 
>> useful advice on what OSen have:
>> (a) out-of-the-box 9500 RAID support, since I'm clearly not getting any
>> from 3Ware;
> 
> FreeBSD 7.1
> http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.1R/hardware.html
> 
> No experience, but since it supports the 3ware 9500 series and has ZFS,
> seems like a good place to start:
> 
> http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFS
> 
>> (b) software RAID1 support for mirrored boot;
> 
> Probably FreeBSD (I've done it in Linux, and would be surprised if FreeBSD
> didn't).
> 
>> (c) a decently functional, decently configurable, decently fast, and
>> generally not-brain-damaged nfsd?
> 
> I'd expect FreeBSD to have a good one, but I don't personally know.
> 
>> I'd hoped to use this box to learn both Solaris 10 and ZFS.  It seems
>> clear now that neither of those is happening, but I may as well at least
>> get some use out of the box.
> 
> FreeBSD should get you ZFS anyway.


Thanks, I thought I recalled one of the BSDen had oob 9500 support.

I suppose another alternative is to throw away the 9500 and stuff in
several smaller Solaris10-supported SATA JBOD cards.  The machine has
two PCI-X slots (one of which currently holds the 9500) and two
available PCI32 slots.  Though FreeBSD would at least let me use the
existing hardware and get the box into service more or less as
originally planned, and it would give me some hands-on time with another
BSD...

I may well go that route, fond though I am of Sun's nfsd.  (Who'da
thought the company that invented NFS would have the best nfsd....)


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.