Sorry to interrupt various flamewars with some actual technical discussion... :-)
At ${REALJOB}, we've got a couple of Maxtor MaxAttach boxes we're trying
to play with. These are dedicated NFS/SMB servers. Physically they are
1U boxes with four 70GB IDE disks on them (wd0, wd1, wd2, wd3). They
have Pentium (P55C) processors, 128MB of RAM, an on-board fxp device, no
slots, and no removable media devices, all this on what appears to be a
semi-custom motherboard. We managed to find a serial console with the
help of a multimeter and an oscilloscope. The OS appears to be a
stripped-down FreeBSD 3.X...they have some kind of concatenated disk
driver that seems similar to ccd(4).
For various reasons, we're trying to figure out how to get a stock
FreeBSD 4-STABLE on them. We tossed in a scratch disk with 4.5-STABLE
as the primary master disk; the machine wouldn't even give a loader
prompt. We also tried booting with the existing wd0 and wd1, and our
disk on the secondary master; we could boot, but got a kernel panic
during an attempted boot to single-user mode...I suspect in the
concatenated disk driver trying to do some consistency checking.
I should mention that with all four of the original disks installed,
it functions properly, if slowly, as an NFS server. We're trying not
to wipe out the existing boot disk until we have at least a warm, furry
feeling that this is going to work. We haven't gotten that yet.
In theory we could put a populated obj/ tree on the existing disks and
use this to do a installkernel/installworld, but this commits us to a
course of action really early without an easy way to back out if
something goes wrong (see last paragraph).
Has anyone played around with one of these boxes?
Thanks in advance!
Bruce.
PS. It's crossed my mind that the staff time involved in making this
work could quickly exceed the cost of buying equivalent (maybe even
better) "normal" hardware. :-)
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