[ On Wednesday, June 23, 2004 at 15:58:52 (-0600), Michael L. Hitch wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: ES40, ES45, etc. support?
>
>   I just booted a 2.0F install disk on an ES40, and the installation
> booted fine.  It recognized the 4 CPUs and the 8GB of memory.  The
> RAID controller that came with the machine wasn't configured.  I didn't
> have any installation sets available, so I didn't actually complete
> the installation.

Wonderful news!  (though of course the earlier report of MP kernels
failing to boot still concerns me, but given FreeBSD claims to work fine
on them it shouldn't be a huge effort to fix NetBSD too...)

My plan has been to recommend a used ES40 Model 2 to my client.  Even if
they have to pay a premium for the fastest (833MHz) CPUs, it should
suffice for their needs for the forseable future, and such machines
appear to be relatively easy to acquire at a decent price (e.g. as
little as 1/10'th the cost of a similarly configured new ES45).  The
only semi-sane alternative would be to go with an older 8400 fully
configured with the fastest CPUs, but I worry that it would be too
difficult to spread the I/O load across the PCI busses with the modern
RAID controllers necessary to drive currently available disks.  There's
no sense in using more and older disks just to get the concurrency up to
speed when they'll have to be fed more power and cool air, and they'll
probably fail sooner.

>   We've also got an ES45 and an ES47 based system, but they are production
> system and the sysadmin isn't going to let me go anywhere near them with
> NetBSD.

Oh, well.... 

Maybe one of them will have to be shut down for maintenance at some
point soon and maybe they'll let you test-boot a CD if you're in the
right place at the right time.  :-)

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098                  VE3TCP            RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
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