On Tue, 28 Jul 2020 20:13:13 +0200 David Walker <[email protected]> wrote:
> CPU: 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2650L V3 (total 12 cores 24 threads) > Ram: 4 x 32 GB DDR4 2133MHz 288pin Registered ECC > Motherboard: Supermicro X10DRD-iNT > (Apologies for this stupid question, but I am wondering whether I should > buy the machine, offered used & cheap nearby by a reliable seller, before > someone else does.) > David Walker From the point of view of the hardware there is nothing special with your machine. From my past expierence with DragonFly the problem could lie with the BIOS/uEFI implementation. Specially regarding your choice of video; whether you plan to use integrated video or else. If you intend to boot in BIOS mode the chances that it boots up OK are almost 100%. If you plan to boot in uEFI mode it all depends of how buggy the firmware is. I have some Dell PowerEdge servers; namely R610s/R710s/T710s either v1 and v2 and none of them boot DragonFly in uEFI mode; I mean, they boot it, but you end with no working console since there is somewhere a problem with the efifb switching to the intended hardware, in my case, AMD Radeon Pro video adapters, same story for Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny M715q with AMD A10/R7 APU. Almost all these servers rely on integrated Matrox G200 adapters included in their BMC controllers and the drivers/support for this chips (in general in BSD) is ancient. If you are happy with booting through legacy BIOS, I think there's almost no chance that it won't work. Otherwise, wait for further advise here, there's a lot of more expierenced people than me for sure. PS: Have in mind that almost all the fancy management software for these type of servers are almost coded for Windows or with some luck for CentOS/RHEL. For the most part you don't need it to run the servers, I mean, status dashboards and the like. But I think you should know at least.
