Hmmm.. Tried to post this before, but it doesn't appear. I'll try again. I've been discussing the concept of a reference design for Opensolaris systems with a few people. This comes very close to a system you can "just buy".
I spent about six months burning up google and pestering people here about this issue. In the end, I largely copied a system which someone (Constantin Gonzalez) had blogged about here: ===================================================== http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CAYQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.sun.com%2Fconstantin%2Fentry%2Fa_small_and_energy_efficient&ei=bU-7S97KKY2gnQf25bytCA&usg=AFQjCNFhP99ZqaNZrhCOFgsLXHcumcVDOw ===================================================== It was inexpensive for what I got, and worked largely the first time I connected it up. It would make a good reference design, excepting only that in the several weeks since I made it, the motherboard has been discontinued by ASUS, although it's still available in many places. A reference design is a setup that some knowing person or group has put together and verified to work. It is later replicable by people of lesser skills with little or no exposure to malfunction or long debugging. Here's the system I did: ASUS M3A78-CM (about $60 when I got mine) AMD Athlon II 240e ($70, the 240 is cheaper, but a few more watts) Kingston 800MHz DDR2 unbuffered ECC ram, 2x 2GB ($80) Syba PCIe x1 dual port SATA card ($26) 2x 40GB 2.5" SATA drives for mirrored boot pool ($52) 6x 750GB SATA drives for raidz2 storage pool, giving 4TB usable and 2-disk failure immunity. Case, power supply, cables, etc. to taste. I bought new, because I was looking for a long-term reliable backup server, but used would work as well for lower cost. In spite of reported issues with the ethernet chipset on the mobo, it just worked on my network, as installed. In fact, all of it just worked on install. The driver test utility reported zero issues. USB worked. Keyboard, mouse, and integrated video worked. So did the Syba card. No driver finagling. Bring up time was only extended by my not knowing which commands to type. That includes making the remote console, remote desktop, and storage array available through the network on my Windows XP email machine. Now that I know what commands to type, it would take me less than an hour to set another one up from unpacking the shipping boxes. The "knowing what commands to type" took me a bit, but it's not terribly taxing. Most of it was finding the help sections on the web and in the Open Solaris Bible and typing what I was told. This would be a great candidate for a reference design except for Asus discontinuing it. That will be the bane of reference designs like this. It pretty much requires an ongoing effort of people assembling and documenting their work as new motherboards flow through the system. This is kind of what the HCL was probably intended to be, but does not measure up to for a neophytes. The HCL for Solaris proper is much more usable in that it seems to have a database back end and lets you select things, bringing up trees of choices. Ah, well. I think a local custom computer shop could replicate my server very quickly indeed. It's not a "just buy and unwrap" but it's remarkably close. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
