On Thu, 2002-03-14 at 14:55, Hoyt wrote: > Thanks. > > The server is replacing a quad Xeon SCO box used for a hospital. There are > two networks and the hospital uses a thin-client topology, so network > performance is important. The shared interrupts are compromising the > networking performance. Or if those are working, the disk access is > compromised. Neither is good. > > One solution may be to disable the onboard NIC and use a dual port NIC. If > Tyan had not disabled the ability in the BIOS to allocate IRQ per slot, this > would not be a problem. (Why would they do this on a server class mobo? They > don't have a clue.)
Hoyt, Tyan in the past has filled some large market gaps. In the pentium 1 days, they were one of the few mobo manufacturers to offer a dual processor mainboard. Between 1992 and 1998 I had a networking business, and we offered the hardware and the networking expertise for windows/Novell hybrid lans. Prior to 1992 one of my jobs was mobo and hardware eval for a local Computerland. Later, for my customers we standardized on tyan mobos; at that time they were the best. However, as time rolled on, there were mobo manufacturers that emerged as being more adaptable to the needs of the public. For one thing, web hardware sites emerged that actually tested and benchmarked the system boards. One thing that peeps really wanted was a way to overclock processors. As this practice took on more impetus, so did the engineers designing the chipsets for these mobos. For another thing, the chipsets had to be extremely (and I mean REAL) fault tolerant. At first glance, an overclocking mobo might seem like a non-server, more error prone solution. Actually that's backwards; the companies that were surviving on the reputation that their boards were "Server boards", were actually coasting and resting on their laurels. In the meantime, companies like Abit, Asus, FIC, Epox, and other Dr Tom roundup graduates were in reality putting out infinitely more adaptable and robust product; far exceeding the requirements for a "server board." You can't lie to the hardware sites; they are going to test your stuff. Even more to this degree, you cannot lie to Tom's Hardware; Dr Tom is the supreme source for honest hardware advice. I don't mean to be telling anything that you are not already aware of; I guess I'm putting this down for anybody else that might be interested too. Of late, I've gotten away from the hardware aspect (thank God), but for old customers, close friends and such I've basically standardized on Abit hardware. (for now, unless they get shown up really bad, like Tyan did some years back.) My opinion regarding Tyan is that they really have not responded to the bleeding edge users like they should have; and it's not a recent thing either, it's been going on for a long time now. There's no problem like a hardware problem. And when you have a hardware problem, there's no substitute for a tech like hands on access to the system. One final question. Have you tried downloading an older version of the bios and flashing it with that? One that is capable of handling the IRQ's in a more intelligent way? Also...the corollary to this is: does your mobo as of right now have "the" most current bios version? If not, it may pay for you to go the other way as well to newer. Just make sure smartdrv.exe is not loaded in the boot process when you boot the dos disk to flash the bios. Or you could lose the system. > Tyan S2466 motherboard > 4 GB ECC RAM > 3COM 905 built-on-motherboard > Radeon 7XXX AGP > 3COM 905 PCI 32 bit > Adaptec 29160 SCSI 64 bit, 66Mhz > Adaptec 3410S RAID 64 bit, 66Mhz > The board has 4 32 bit 33Mhz PCI slots and 2 64 bit 66Mhz slots (those for > the SCSI controllers). > The built-in 3Com pretends to be on "slot 8" > > > BTW, as a warning to all, The current mobo BIOS has a bug that causes the > selection of ECC RAM to crash the boot process. > > The OS is Mandrake 8.2-RC1 with the Enterprise kernel. > > -- > Hoyt > > http://www.maximumhoyt.com > > > A computer without Windows is like a chocolate cake without mustard. _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
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