Updated faq or not, at the end of the day, you need to vet your own buying decisions. To that end, in this realm, it's not about the brand name *on* the box, but rather the chip sets *in* the box.
The primary chip sets are the north- and south-bridge, NIC, and video. The hard drive -- scsi or s-ata or p-ata -- interface chip set, if NOT part of the N/S-bridge, are also very important. In these regards, there *are* best (and better) choices. Obtain the IBM or HP server's technical spec sheet and look up the chip sets and then bench the box against the oBSD drivers for same. I have used IBM servers with obsd. The boxes that use intel north-south bridges, intel nics and ati (2D) video chip sets all worked just fine (since obsd 3.9->4.2). Some series used via, broadcom or nvidia, respectively, in some combination that proved too frustrating. After chip sets comes the oem's BIOS and ACPI implementation. Unlike chip sets, these two bad boys are hard to pre-qualify. IMO, DELL may be an overall safer choice. They tend to favor broadcom nix chips on their server boxes. It's not that bc's wouldn't work at all; it's that they didn't work as well as the i's nic chip -features like tcp off-loading, vlan, teaming, etc. were (at the time) weak or just troublesome. It's my understanding that it's not a silicon thing; it's a driver thing where the -- oem -- hasn't been open-friend thus hindering the open developers. /Scott -----Original Message----- From: Selva Raj <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: misc@openbsd.org Subject: OpenBSD supported servers ? Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2007 16:37:34 +0530 Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Hi all, I am looking for a HP or IBM server which can run OpenBSD Operating System out of the box? Any suggestions will be great useful to me. Regards, //Selva
