The ASUS M4A785-M motherboard has a built in Realtek RTL8111/8168B Gigabit network interface. While it worked out of the box with OpenSolaris 2009.06 (svn-111b) it would drop the connection at random points never to return. The logs were silent about the cause.
Found lots of trouble reports on the net including Bug ID: 6807184 rge driver drops off network. One of the later replies to serialized.net » The littlest Thumper: OpenSolaris NAS on an MSI Wind PC summed it up well: "There’s no know work around for this with the native rge driver. However, there is a third party driver “gani” that seems to have fixed the issue for me: http://homepage2.nifty.com/mrym3/taiyodo/eng/"
One of the many great things about OpenSolaris is that you can set up multiple boot environments, that is snapshot your existing setup, with beadm. See Working With Multiple Boot Environments on the OpenSolaris OS for details.
I pulled down the 2.6.4 "gani" driver and installed the amd64/gcc version into a new boot environment. It solved the network dropping problem but it's painfully slow. Writes over NFS top out at 2.1 MB/sec on a gig link. The old rge driver didn't do any better. I may have to get another network card...
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Saturday, January 16, 2010
OpenSolaris host
I decided to build an OpenSolaris server but wanted to keep the cost down. The parts were:
Component | Cost |
Case and PS | $74.99 |
Motherboard and CPU | $179.99 |
Memory | $101.98 |
Mirrored drives | $0.00 |
Keyboard | $17.99 |
Mouse | $0.00 |
DVD-R, CD-RW | $0.00 |
Display | $0.00 |
Graphics card | $0.00 |
Total | $374.95 |
The case and power supply were a Fry's special. Antec Two Hundred Mid Tower case and Antec Basiq 550W Plus PSU ($20 rebate shown in cost). The case has lots of room for expansion but isn't a tool-less design.
I got a motherboard and CPU combo that was shown in the OpenSolaris compatibility list verified as compatible. The ASUS M4A785-M AMD AM3 Motherboard has good expandability and on-board graphics. The AMD Athlon II X4 620 2.6 GHz AM3 CPU is an inexpensive quad code CPU.
I got 2 Kingston 2GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) KVR800D2N5/2G memory sticks and have two slots for future expansion.
I used two 1 GIg drives from a failed Sans Digital external mirror case. I'm using ZFS to mirror the drives in OpenSolaris.
Other than a SIIG Mini USB Keyboard, I had spares for the mouse, DVD drive and display. Except for the initial install, I'm planning to run the machine headless.
The OpenSolaris initial install went smoothly so now it's time to have fun with ZFS, xVM, etc.
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