Recent trouble

Saturday, February 2nd, 2008 @ 6:44 pm | Anduin, Users

Hi all,

you might have noticed some degree of downtime on Anduin.net lately. I sincerely apologise for that.

After having upgraded to FreeBSD 7.0-PRERELEASE, I wanted to try to make use of the gigabit ethernet interfaces in the server, which have been unused so far due to a lack of gigabit connectivity. Now all switches and routers in the datacentre have been upgraded, and I wanted to take advantage of that. I have also acquired a NAS unit (network attached storage) for backup purposes, and having gigabit connectivity would be a major advantage and time-saver.

Unfortunately, Broadcom generally produces crap equipment, and the onboard ethernet controller in anduin.net is no exception. Since day one (2005) it has caused me nothing but headaches. I had hoped FreeBSD 7 would work better (work has been done on the driver to work around even more hardware quirks), but alas.

So, I'm back to square one. Back on 100mbit (but stable at least), and awaiting the delivery of an Intel PRO/1000 server adapter which should work a lot better.

I've also secured a pair of new CPUs, and will upgrade them at the same time as I install the new ethernet adapter. This should bring some much-needed extra performance - going from 2x 1.6GHz to 2x 2.8GHz CPUs.

Until then, I expect the box to be stable again (though I'll need to reboot it once more later tonight in order to get rid of some debugging code in the kernel).

/Eirik

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