Re: FreeBSD 6 (or 7) on a HP DL140 G3 SATA

On Sun, 10 Dec 2006, J. Martin Petersen wrote:

> Ulf Zimmermann wrote:
>> On Sat, Dec 09, 2006 at 11:47:21AM +0000, Robert Watson wrote:
>>> Upgrading proved to be a bit of a pain because the boxes don't have CDROM 
>>> or floppy drives, and the HP firmware updater download is rather weird, 
>>> but once it was updated (using a USB floppy drive) all was happiness. 
>>> Oddly, the i386 loader had no problem at all...
>
> I think we tried both without success, but I am not 100% sure.
>
>> Here is how I update the bios on DL140. Create a DOS boot disk (I usual use 
>> 6.22), put a ramdisk driver on it and whatever you need to flash the bios. 
>> Then make an image of the disk and load it into your pxe server. Boot via 
>> PXE said floppy image, copy BIOS flash utils and firmware to ramdisk. Then 
>> run software from there. If you don't use the ram disk, I have seen it fail 
>> often.
>
> We created a bootable USB stick with each of the BIOS'es and used that to 
> flash with. Very easy and worked like a charm, once we found a 
> Windows-"enabled" laptop.
>
> What kind of disk performance are you seeing from the disks hooked up to the 
> mpt-controller? We are seeing disk transfers around 6MB/sec, which seems 
> very slow, but I do not know how to diagnose it.

I'm only using ATA RAID on my boxes, so can't comment on that, sorry!  These 
boxes are primarily used for 10gbps network testing, not storage testing...

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge