Dell Poweredge R200 + R300

KoalaTNR

Hello,

we wan't to build a clustered firewall with carp. I would order 2 Poweredge R200 or R300. In FreeBSD HCL I doesn't found
the HDD-/Raid-Controllers of the machines.

I will install PFSense 1.2 based on FreeBSD 6.3. Has anyone PFSense running on this machines?
Does the internal HDD-Controller of R200 and R300 work on FreeBSD 6.3? Does the SAS 6iR internal RAID Controller work on FreeBSD 6.3?

Greetings
KoalaTNR

David_W

The internal SATA controller of the R200 definitely works on FreeBSD 6.3 - this message comes to you via an R200 running pfSense 1.2 on FreeBSD 6.3. The standard image doesn't work because the ICH9 isn't supported. If the R300 has the same SATA controller, then that, too, is supported - though they are rather different machines.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that the R200's SATA controller is RAID capable, as I believe the motherboard uses an ICH9R. However, Dell's BIOS lacks support for the AHCI functionality of the controller, reducing it to a simple ATA emulation with no RAID.

The SAS 6/iR should work on FreeBSD 6.3 - I don't have any first-hand experience, though I'm thinking of adding one to my R200 to give it hardware RAID 1 capabilities, and I'm 99% sure that the necessary support was added to the mpt(4) driver. I believe the only issue is that there's no RAID management software available for FreeBSD, so monitoring the status of the RAID is difficult. To that end, if you order a machine with a SAS 6/iR, especially if it's an R200 or R300 with non-hot swap drives, I'd love to see the order details with all the various part numbers. I think I have the right part number for the SAS 6/iR, but I'm much less sure of the part number or numbers for the cables.

For what it's worth, the NICs on the R200 are a pair of bge devices. They work well under FreeBSD in my experience.

Sh4

The 6.3 release works with SAS 6 (and from what I know SAS drives are hot swappable, but maybe just had luck) but the PERC/6i doesn't work properly under 6.3, get lots of errors.

roosterdude

We're running pfSense 1.2 on some Dell R200's and R300's
The only issue we had was the SATA CD but we got around that swiftly by installing from a USB CD drive.
Hope that helps

bransyuur

@roosterdude:

We're running pfSense 1.2 on some Dell R200's and R300's
The only issue we had was the SATA CD but we got around that swiftly by installing from a USB CD drive.
Hope that helps

Hello Roosterdude,

Please, can you explain how you got running pfSense on a Dell R300 with no onboard NIC's problem?
I have 2 Dell PowerEdge R300 with 4 NIC's, one dual NIC Intel Pro 1000 and, onboard, 2 NIC's Broadcom that the pfSense don't know. The only method that I've used for get pfSense working on the four NIC's was installing the 1.3 Alpha-Alpha (now 2.0 Alpha-Alpha).

And, my question is… there's any method to put the current Kernel that know these Broadcom NIC's into the current stable release? Are this a "crazy question"? This are possible to do?

Thanks.

AudiAddict

I have the exact same setup as above.. and I was able to install with a external dvd unit.

The only problem is that I'm having BAD HDR length issues in the logs (http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,12372.0.html)

So it seems the Poweredge R200 machine doesn't work well with the freebsd 1.2.1 release :(