Re: Building a cheap testbed server
From: Marko Vihoma (marko_at_where.ever.invalid)
Date: 05/05/05
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Date: Thu, 05 May 2005 02:57:32 +0300
Tuesday 19 April 2005 21:04 Margaret MacDonald wrote in
comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:
> I'm a longtime supporter of the freeBSD project, but the last time I
> actually had a copy up and running it was on a 486x2 EISA box, which
> tells you how long ago THAT was!
>
> Now I need to build a testbed webserver (Apache and MySQL) for a
> project I'm working on, and want to do it cheaply. I have an ASUS
> TX97 mboard with a Pentium 200MHz MMX chip and 128Mb plus some
> semi-retired SCSI disks that should work okay. I'm planning to use
> fBSD 5.3 unless there's some reason I should stay with the 4.n tree.
I used to have one of those TX-97-E:s in a FreeBSD 4.x fileserver myself
with a BIOS upgrade from someone somewhere (not ASUS) that allowed to
use K6-[23]. I clocked the PCI bus to ~83MHz to get my AMD K6-2/500MHz
running at ~499MHz and used it with a Matrox MGA Millennium I 1MB or
2MB. Anyway it was able to produce an X display just fine even if I
didn't need it. Only "problem" (from Your point of view) was that it
could only go as high as 800x600. Someone who remembers how to count
can tell You how many megabytes You need to get 1024x768...
Oh, I had another problem too: the motherboard's PCI bus got charred
(after many years of service) probably because of overclocking and was
replaced with a Intel i865 board and P4...
Anyway Matrox makes good quality display adapters, and those old MGA
cards can be scavenged from trash for about free.
> But I'll need to buy a video card for the system, since my Matrox G550
> now lives in my dev machine. In the past, I've just accepted the
> limitations of straight vga since i'm used to text-mode unix anyway,
> but I wouldn't actually *mind* being able to run 768x1024 or better
> and use Motif. The problem, though, is that (back then, at least) the
> Intel drivers for higher resolutions tended to be buggy, or only
> available for a few cards, or cost the earth, or have some other
> discouraging problem.
I don't think You can buy an Intel video card (except when integrated to
the MB) or that You could have bought one then...
If You are going to use graphical applications, You'll find out they are
mostly made with GTK+-[12], QT or plain X toolkit, not Motif.
> Is there a PCI video card that stands out as the best (low price/solid
> driver) choice these days, or is it all still a mess?
For hardware accelerated 3D graphics in FreeBSD or Linux I'd go for
Nvidia's latest batch (TNT[12] won't match (open drivers up to 9200)
radeons, though), the proprietary drivers are of good quality. If You
don't need 3D (like You don't in Your server), I'd get a cheap (or
free) Matrox from the last millennium ;-)
-- marko [dot] vihoma [at] dnainternet [dot] net Keskustelua zombeista c.u.b.freebsd.misc: Thanks, parents were stuck and had to be killed.
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