On Sep 15, 2008, at 6:04 PM, Russell Howe wrote:
Johan Strvm wrote, sometime around 15/09/08 16:39:
On Sep 15, 2008, at 5:16 PM, Russell Howe wrote:
Johan Strvm wrote, sometime around 15/09/08 15:46:
Well, the main questions is if DL360/DL320 & OpenBSD is working
good together, the rest is only me thinking out loud :)
They work fine for me.
I have a pair of DL320 G5 machines each with a quad port Intel Pro/
1000 PT card in them and they do all our vlan routing and pass
traffic off into an OSPF area on its way to the internet.
Sounds good. Are you using only these quad ports? Or the onboard too?
Onboard too. I went a bit overkill and bonded everything into pairs.
Onboard bonded crossover cable to the other box for pfsync/sasync
then a couple of other bonded pairs off the quad port card with
vlans on top of that.
Basically, I have 3 more gigE interfaces available should I need
them. (I can unbond one of the pairs - none of them need to be 2 x
gigE).
That sounds overkill indeed hehe. Have you ever seen over 1GBit off
traffic over any of the bonded links?
I've been thinking about using one onboard to external, one for
pfsync and then get a dualport NIC where both ports are bonded to
the switch. Since I will do both external and internal routing (but
I'm not sure I will even be able to get that performance out of the
box so might be a none-problem), it would be nice to have 2GBit in
case I actually push 1 gig of traffic on the external interface (in
which case the internal would be full too and thus internal routing
would suffer)..
You don't happen to have any numbers on performance do you?
Never really benchmarked actually, so nothing specific, no.
Okay
I do know that the carp failover is lovely, though. Nothing notices
a box being rebooted (haven't yet tried yanking a power cable).
Indeed it is. Works like a charm when I've been testing (with boring
hardware though). Pulling one of the NIC cables resulted in a small
hickup but TCP recovered quite quick (packets flowing on the other box
after a second or so).
iLO is fine - just set it up for serial console (if you want a GUI
console you have to buy an 'Advanced iLO' license, but it's really
not needed for a router box). You'll probably want to flip the iLO
virtual serial port to be the 1st serial port, just to make life
simpler.
Yeah, openbsd works pretty good with the serial console, but how is
it with BIOS etc? If I recall correct one can access RBSU (HPs rom
boot thingy) etc from text console too. How is it with bootloader
support for console? That works all the way right? Never used it
myself in openbsd.
Yep, it all works just fine. There are a few options for accessing
the BIOS I think - text console or a curses-type interface.
Nice.
The DL320 can have proper RAID, but only if you buy an additional
controller. I use a pair of 80G SATA drives with the onboard
controller and they work fine (the box doesn't really do much disk
I/O - all the network monitoring and graphing is elsewhere).
Yep, thats my plan too (or well 250G since 250G is almost as cheap
as 80G, and we are using 250G in other machines, no need for
different spares), and use software raid. One thing I'm worried
about though is if one disk fails, will the BIOS be able to boot
from the other disk with a broken/empty disk in the first slot? I
haven't seen any indications in the BIOS about being able to
change, and I've had similar problems before (empty disk in slot1,
disk with OS in slot2, box refusing to boot since disk1 is empty).
I don't think this will work with the way I have it set up at
present. The trick on Linux is to install the bootloader on disk 2
so that it is configured to boot from disk 1 (as disk #2 will become
disk #1 when disk #1 is no longer there or operational). I haven't
tried to figure out the necessary magic for that as yet.
Hm yeah but what if disk1 is clean? I'd guess you want to have disk
1's bootloader try to boot from disk1, while disk 2's loader boots
from disk2 (until software raid takes over, at least thats how it
works with gmirror in freebsd).
I just converted a test machine to running from a USB flash drive with
all FS'es readonly and running /dev /var and /tmp from ramdisk. Wasn't
too much work, somewhat slower at boot only.. :) All logging would be
done over syslog to third party machines if I decide to run with this.
Dunno how reliable USB flash drives are though, even if you don't
write to them..
Thanks for your input!
--
Johan
