- Opteron 1212 CPU
- 2GB of DDR 800Mhz RAM
- 250GB SATA Drive
I could have purchased a second drive from Dell but they wanted close to $200 for another 250GB drive. I ended up picking up a 500GB drive from Seagate for under $100. I also chose not to get the keyboard and mouse because I planned to run the server remotely.
My first foray into setting the machine up was to install the current version of 64-bit FreeBSD. The machine did very well with FreeBSD 7.1 64-Bit but all of the software I needed did not perform so well in 64-bit. Yes, it is true that many system administrators end up running 32-bit on their 64-bit machines because of software compatibility issues.
In the end I settled on FreeBSD 6.3 32-bit. Although I have used this version of FreeBSD on other machines in the past I encountered a problem. The chipset on the integrated Gigabit NIC is too new for FreeBSD6.3. I had a spare NIC card kicking around my shop so I ended up using that to install my software until I was able to find a solution that would allow me to use the built-in NIC.
In the end I narrowed it down to some code that needed to be edited in the source code for the bge driver:
/usr/src/sys/dev/bge
if_bge.c*
--- 169,175 ----
{ BCOM_VENDORID, BCOM_DEVICEID_BCM5715S },
{ BCOM_VENDORID, BCOM_DEVICEID_BCM5720 },
{ BCOM_VENDORID, BCOM_DEVICEID_BCM5721 },
+ { BCOM_VENDORID, BCOM_DEVICEID_BCM5722 },
{ BCOM_VENDORID, BCOM_DEVICEID_BCM5750 },
{ BCOM_VENDORID, BCOM_DEVICEID_BCM5750M },
{ BCOM_VENDORID, BCOM_DEVICEID_BCM5751 },
if_bgereg.h*
--- 2011,2017 ----
#define BCOM_DEVICEID_BCM5715S 0x1679
#define BCOM_DEVICEID_BCM5720 0x1658
#define BCOM_DEVICEID_BCM5721 0x1659
+ #define BCOM_DEVICEID_BCM5722 0x165a
#define BCOM_DEVICEID_BCM5750 0x1676
#define BCOM_DEVICEID_BCM5750M 0x167C
#define BCOM_DEVICEID_BCM5751 0x1677 The Dell PowerEdge T105 has a built-in NIC that uses the Broadcom 5722 chipset. By adding the two bold lines above to the source of the bge driver files and recompiling the kernel I was now able to use the NIC and pull out my spare card.
I am still having an issue with the machine powering itself off at odd times but all of my diagnostics have come up clean. I have turned off all power management in the system BIOS just in case something is in conflict there. I also purchased a UPS with auto voltage regulation in case I have some dirty power issues on the circuit.