Hi Peter, > I got a nice server in a 4U rack with MSI mobo with ATi chipset and > the card with the sata raid hotswap enclosure, and so on and also > orders to make a backup server from the stuff. These are my > instructions ;) [...] > So I have to use linux anyway. > What a pity ;(
In your particular situation, i agree to both of your conclusions: Yes, imho, Linux is your best option and yes, that's a pity. But please don't blame OpenBSD, rather blame Adaptec (just in case you feel any urge to blame anybody). One more point: Make sure you do not try to run factory default firmware. That's quite possibly even more buggy than the latest firmware release which will probably still be just buggy enough. For example, in the case of my Adaptec 2410SA, firmware 4.0-0 appears to be crap, firmware 4.1-0 (build 7244) appears to be utter crap, firmware 4.2-0 (build 7348) appears to more or less work with the latest driver directly from Adaptec. Make sure you first flash the proper firmware and then create file systems and not the other way round. Some of these firmware upgrades require wiping the disks and creating new RAID arrays from scratch (hear, hear, btw). I would suggest checking http://www.openbsd.org/i386.html#hardware regularly after each OpenBSD release. Maybe Adaptec might supply docs at some point in the future, maybe somebody might be tempted to do some reverse engineering, maybe some other miracle might occur. Don't count on it, but just in case it happens, don't miss it. Watch out for the (*) after Adaptec FSA-based RAID controllers (aac) in the hardware list disappearing. Apart from that, you should probably tell your boss that the hardware you were given is rather bad (even if you can make it work, which i think you will manage to do). So if they really care for the data backed up to that server, they should consider getting more reliable hardware, e.g. ami. Yours, Ingo
