Text 6575, 86 rader
Skriven 2006-07-13 15:42:28 av Maurice Kinal (1:261/38.9)
   Kommentar till text 6572 av James Bradley (1:134/77.0)
Ärende: Newbie
==============
Hey James!

Jul 13 01:59 06, James Bradley wrote to Maurice Kinal:

 JB> Compaq distributes their BIOS programs on boot floppies run by DOS.

Same with older HP's.

 JB> I 
 JB> suspect their "F10" HD partition would do likelwise.

For scsi?  That is usually a rom chip so nothing to do with floppies.

 JB> EVERYTHING stacks up on IRQ 11, untill an SMP OS wakes up the second 
 JB> CPU.

I think that is wrong.  Do you have the bios floppies for that machine?  I am
guessing there is something in there or perhaps a jumper on the motherboard to
turn on/off the second cpu.  Also there may be a missing VRM for the second
cpu.  Have you tried booting with just one cpu?

 JB> It looks like a scrambled mess. I relented, and tossed W2K on it. 
 JB> <D+R>

Does it see and use both cpu's?

 JB> I think I have another ATI built into a rackmount Dell. That one is 
 JB> slated for my #1 "PowerEdge" Slackware system.

That'll work.

 JB> I hope it too has 
 JB> hot-plug SCSII, but I could farm that out easily enough. It has a 
 JB> standard 168p DIMM socket for the cache, but it needs a "Dell plug" 
 JB> to activate it. I doubt if it is anything more than a keyed JP with a 
 JB> few wires criss-crossing. /-:

I don't know.  Never had or played with a Dell server.

 JB> PCI-E... That'll take five or six years to trickle down to here. [-| 
 JB> I can wait.

Me too.  Nice but not worth any extra expense to me.

 JB> Say, I stripped the big Dell servers, and it turned out they tried to 
 JB> update the SCSI channel on all four. If there's a need for PCI Am 
 JB> Megatrend cached contollers, or an Adaptec or two, you know my 
 JB> numbers, right?

:-)  I've got a few pci adaptecs, two with external plugs, that aren't seeing
any action lately.

 JB> Hell, if you know a local needing a server... They are all SMP, with 
 JB> a SCSI cannel onboard.

Sounds great.

 JB> Hmm... I can't say I went that far into it, as I was busy trying to 
 JB> make the BIOS allocate another comm port mostly. The ATI card here is 
 JB> an AGP add-on, so I don't think there is any room to tweak how much 
 JB> system memory they get, no?

Usually that is done in the bios but most half decent agp cards don't need or
use that so I turn it off in the bios and let the card itself take care of it's
needs.  AGP seems to be going the route of ISA though.

 JB> I was digging for a new kernel the other day, but I'm not sure I 
 JB> arrived at the right place. My next project machine - the rackmount 
 JB> Dell - I will toy with with more fervor. This one, I just needed a 
 JB> mail machine pronto.

Understood.  The whole email situation seems pretty screwed up lately.  Myself
I am using a couple perl modules scripted out with vim to do all my email
needs.  Still needs some tweaking but it does work.  If I could find some libs
for email I'd likely go that route but haven't yet looked to see what can be
done in that area.  I am too distracted with the usb flashdisk bootabilty at
the moment especially wrt x86_64.  I am pleasently surprised with this idea so
far as I originally suspected it would be far more hassel then it turned out to
be.  Certain chipsets are an issue but so far I have been successful ignoring
them.

Life is good,
Maurice

--- Msged/LNX 6.2.0
 * Origin: The Pointy Stick Society XIX - All about symmetry ... (1:261/38.9)