I was talking with Sean Rooney about this list and how the BP6 appears
to be a bit flakey. Since mine works pretty well, I don't post much.
I wondered if this was a trend. He said that he'd had good
experiences with quite a few.
I asked him to write up his experiences for forwarding to this list.
Here is the result. He doesn't read the list, so he's not done the
recommended "lurk before posting". But I think these two messages are
*very* interesting.
Notes: Prices are in Canadian dollars. "above all" is a components
and surplus store near his home in Toronto. I trimmed lightly.
Thanks, Sean!
Hugh Redelmeier
[EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: +1 416 482-8253
Date: Tue, 04 Apr 2000 14:48:43 -0500
From: Sean Rooney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: BP6 technical notes.
environments:
Redhat 6.x, suse 6.x, win2k pro., Borderware 6.1.1
hardware guidelines:
BP6 plus bios rev:BP6NJ 11/17/99
cpus:
generally boxed cpus [I use Cel366 SL36C at 550, or cel533s] in
matched pairs.
ram: I use PC100 128meg dimms as the base standard, it works better
if there are multiple DIMMS and they are IDENTICAL. I've also had
very good results using 256meg and 128meg PC133 dimms.
I always use cable select 80wire UDMA/66 cables for ALL devices. The
best drives I've found to use have been the fujitsu MPE30273AH
27.3gig UDMA/66 7200 rpm drives with 2megs SDRAM cache. [the extra
large and fast cache definately helps] the 20gig version is about
$315 at above all, the 27s are harder to get but are about $345 or
so. There are 40/60/80 gig versions in the works and due out soon.
The power supplies ideally should have a capacity of 300 plus watts.
Cooling should be in the general form of at least 2 90mm fans, one in
the front cardcage air intake, and one doing exhaust.
PCI slot 3 shares the same hardware interrupt as the additional
UDMA/66 controller. Be careful not to use that slot at the same time
as the UDMA/66 controller as this will under linux produce some
really interesting results. Win2k seems to handle that form of PCI
interrupt sharing properly. Solaris 8/x86 has yet to be tested by me
personally however I've heard reports from my staff that it works
incredibly well.
ATI AGP/2 cards generally seem to be the most stable and reliable in
this environment. Tridents for some reason most of the time don't
work at all. Make sure the AGP memory allocation is equal to or
greater than the total memory in the system [set in the bios].
Its a good idea on general principals to completely disable all
Advanced power management settings in the bios as these produce
strange problems such as spontaneous reboots when coming back from
low power hibernate.
3COM ethernet cards, particularly 3C900 work very well, SMC's are
problematic. IBM ethernet cards [built by IBM, not OEM] are to be
avoided.
Hmm, thats about it. oh yes, do not under any circumstances use
non-hard disk devices on the spare dual UDMA/66 controller. There is
a bug in the HPT chipset and bios that tends to try to treat zip
drives and cd-rw devices as hard disks. this leads to confusion at
the OS layer.
Date: Wed, 05 Apr 2000 00:47:06 -0500
From: Sean Rooney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: BP6 technical notes.
At 16:43 4/4/00 -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
>For purposes of a submission to the linux-abit list (wherein folks are
>really struggling with the BP6), could you tell me (us) how many
>systems you've deployed and how many mysterious crashes you've
>observed (if I remember correctly, the answer to this latter is
>"none"). Perhaps a number of systems broken down by OS would be
>interesting.
ok;
23: win2k professional, server, advanced server, few problems, no critical.
5 suse linux, most problems caused by using a busmaster device in PCI slot 3
7 redhat 6.x most problems caused by weirdness in AGP slot handling [breaks
X] advanced power management and in one case, bad cooling fans causing OEM
celerons to overheat badly
2 Solaris 8, drivers for extra UDMA/66 HPT bugs... and caused by using
busmaster device in PCI slot 3.
1 Solaris 7, doesnt like overclocking to 100mhz FSB for some reason.
I've found that the overclocked cpus seem to cause more problems with
configs under linux, and most disk problems in HPT/udma 66 device sharing
of slot 3, there seems to be some weird limits in disk size. 40gig disks
just dont go at all under linux, but work fine under win2k.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sean Rooney; President and Chief Technical Architect.
ColdStream Engineering Canada
Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Berlin, Amsterdam
<http://www.coldstream.ca>http://www.coldstream.ca
416-516-8998
PGP Fingerprint:
C32C 88A0 86A8 2BBE 2911 D855 1CE1 1679 6B52 405C
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