OK.. I warned you... stupid hardware questions to follow..

First off I have to admit I strayed to the dark side and played with
FreeBSD 2.2.1 for a while.. It supported what I had.. "ports" was kinda
neat but now it is starting to act creepy.. anyway.

and yes I have looked at the supported hardware list... I am asking for
recommendations for "trench-tested" hardware that's not going to let me
down

Current Hardware config:
(* = something I am pretty sure will need to be swapped out for better
supported hardware)

ASUS P/I-P65UP5 w/ P6 Daughtercard
1 P6/200-256k
256MB RAM
* Adaptec 2940UW
4GB Seagate Barracudda Wide
9GB Micropolis 1991AV (I swear "micropolis" must be an ancient word
			meaning "Bad Drive")
* 3COM 3c905
Matrox Millenia 2MB (overkill for console... I know)

Machine Role:

NFS and Samba File server for about 50-60 folks in IRIX/WinNT/Win95/Mac
environment. The machine will be providng a lot of other basic services
but file serving is priority 1. Most files will be on the large side...
Bread and butter apps being Softimage and Alias on the SGI's and Softimage
on NT boxes.. Lots of Photoshop,3D Studio MAX,Lightwave.. etc... ad
nauseum.

I'm looking for an ethernet adapter that is going to be reliable in
100Mbit / Full-duplex mode and hopefully an ultrawide scsi controller that
can stand up to a beating. Reliability is more important than raw speed.

I'm considering getting a few scsi adapters and more disks and spreading a
ccd interleave across them... any comments? is ccd considered stable
enough for "production environments" ?

I also have a Digital TZ87x (forget the last number) it's basically a 5
tape DLT unit that I am thinking of putting on this box... any one know if
this should work and if so what kind of greif I might expect?


all of the main servers at this company are currently underpowered NT
boxes... This NetBSD box needs to establish credibility so I can justify
decomisioning more of the NT machines. It doesn't have to be the fastest
solution... downtime is the real killer.


thanks for reading this far.


I still haven't convinced any of the programmers to port our 3d engine to
NetBSD ;) Maybe next time I'll try to use more beer.....


as an aside I am thinking of proding them to port our bsp generator to run
on NetBSD and IRIX. and was idling wondering how well NetBSD/i386 utilised
the FPU.. I remeber seeing some posts a while back with FreeBSD and Linux
folks comparing thier FPU lib penis size and was wondering how NetBSD
performed in that area.


now if you read this far you deserve a huge thanks :)


aron roberts
aroberts@wolfenet.com