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Using FreeBSD on the Nokia IP330

I love recycling used equipment that companies think is too old for practical use anymore. I recently dug through a junk pile in a lab and came up with a Nokia IP330 appliance, which I remember as being an i386-based system which could easily run *BSD.

By sancho at 2007/08/12 - 10:47am | | | read more | login to post comments

USB Serial, Radios, and Robots

I recently bought an iRobot Create, which is a simple robotics platform. Using iRobot's Command Module is fine if you just want to do stupid robot tricks, but for more complex applications it would be nice to have more memory and more processing horsepower.

The easiest way to get there is to use a normal computer and communicate remotely with the Create. Bluetooth has some problems, and WiFi is pretty power-hungry, but MaxStream's XBee modules are pretty nice. It so happens that I have access to some of this at work. Cool.

Out of the box, the XBee USB developer board wasn't recognized in OpenBSD. I wrote up a quick article on the OpenBSD Journal about getting that going, which turned out to be easy.

At this point I have a two-way serial link from my laptop to the Create, meaning that I can control the robot and read sensor data. I haven't done anything good with that capability yet, but stay tuned for more if you're into this kind of thing.

By dwc at 2007/02/07 - 10:06am | | | login to post comments

Intel: Only "Open" for Business

Undeadly (the OpenBSD Journal) brings us this article, an open letter from Theo de Raadt to the open source community encouraging everyone to let Intel know how they feel about the company's unwillingness to provide open, unencumbered access to product documentation and firmware.

Without freely distributable firmware images, Intel customers who run on OpenBSD (and in some cases, other BSD and even GNU/Linux) operating systems will find that their OS projects of choice will not be able to provide support for Intel's chips. Who really wants to spend top dollars on Intel hardware and not be able to have it supported correctly in their favorite operating system?

Those willing to do so should email Majid Awad <majid.awad@intel.com> and let him know that Intel customers in the open source community want their vendor to stand behind them and their purchasing decisions.

By sancho at 2006/10/01 - 10:30pm | | | | read more | login to post comments

FreeBSD Raid

Disclaimer: This is very old information kept here for archival purposes. More current information can certainly be found elsewhere on this site or others.

When trying to setup a RAID subsystem for one of the servers at a company I work for, I had to do a lot of research on exactly which RAID controllers do and don't work. This is a summary of what I found by digging through the mailing lists, reading vendors notes, and so on. Hopefully others will find this usefull. I obviously haven't actually tried all of these devices, so this is mostly based on info I've gleaned from elsewhere and I can't guarantee the accuracy of it. If you notice anything on this page being out of date or wrong inform old address removed.

Manufact Model Comments Price *
Software Based Solutions
FreeBSD CCD Concatenated Disk Driver. Raid 0 and Raid 1 support only. See the CCD(4) and ccdconfig(8) man pages. $0
FreeBSD vinum Logical Volume Manager. Supports Concatenated plexes, Striped plexes, and RAID-5 plexes See the vinum(4) and vinum(8) man pages. Also http://www.lemis.com/vinum.html has some good information. NOTE: The RAID 5 portion is copyright Cybernet, Mail Cybernet directly for details. $0 (Raid 0/1)
$???? (Raid 5)
HOST Based Adapters
DPT PM3334UW All of the older DPT controllers are reported to work. The DPT SmartRAID V controllers DO NOT currently work, as they are I20 based and FreeBSD does not currently support the I20 spec (due to the restrictive licensing). For updates watch Simon Shapiro's web site. I do know that Simon is working on the SmartRAID V cards, no ETA yet though. 1 ch - $1241USD (S)
2 ch - $1431USD (S)
3 ch - $1636USD (S)
DPT PM3334UW/2-BB PM3334UW two channel PCI-to-Ultra Wide SCSI RAID Adapter (requires 4M Ram) $1431USD (S)
Compaq Smart 3200, 2/DH, and 2/P PCI adapters See http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~md/ida/ for details, These are NOT currently part of the standard distro, but must be added manually to the kernel (doesn't look to hard). Not a lot on how well this works, anyone?? See your Compaq
Reseller
SCSI-SCSI Based Adapters
All the SCSI-SCSI adapters sit in between the host adapter and the SCSI subsystem. It is recommended that you have a high performance SCSI controller in the host to get maximum throughput. People have reported good luck with Adaptec 2940/3940 controllers and Mylex (NON RAID!) controllers.
Infortrend The nice people at Media Integration have graciously given the BSD community special pricing on SCSI-SCSI Raid controllers.


Notes:
Here are some gotcha's with the Infortrend controllers (no show stoppers):

  • Make sure you have good and matching simms. The controller will hang with some memory chips. I've had bad luck with EDO (yeah yeah use ECC if you can afford it).
  • At least some Adaptecs controllers seem to think the UW (20M) controller can do 40M, while this may work some of the time, it can occasionally give errors. Lock the host controller speed/width to match the RAID SCSI device.
Mylex DAC960SX Dual controller hot failover, 16-265M cache, 1 channel to host, two channels to drives.
DACSUI-2W4M 8M cache (to 64M), 1 host, 5 SCSI $4309USD (L)
$3200USD (S)
DACSUI-5W-8M 4M cache (to 64M), 1 host, 2 SCSI $3236USD (L)
$2352USD (S)
DACSXIH-2W16M 16M cache (to 256M), Dual controller failover, 1 host, 2 SCSI, expandable $2995USD (L)
$2528USD (S)
DACSXIH-5W-64M 32M cache (to 256M), Dual controller failover, 1 host, 5 SCSI $5295USD (L)
$3331USD (S)
DAC960SU and DAC960SX I couldn't find anyone selling these, so I'm just noting they exist.
A note on CMD controllers A lot of people have been reporting unresolvable problems with the CMD controllers. A couple people have reported success, but not a lot. I can't specifically NOT recommend these controllers, but I can't really recommend them right now either. If you've had positive or negative experience with these controllers let me know and I'll anotate this as we go.
CMD CRD-5440 up to 256M RAM, Raid 0,1,0+1,5, 2-3 Disk and 1-3 host interfaces

ORD-5440-001 - with four UltraSCSI/Wide/Single-Ended channels any of which may be configured as host or disk channels

ORD-5440-002 - with two UltraSCSI/Wide/Differential host channels and two UltraSCSI/Wide/Single-Ended disk channels
CMD CRD-5500-001 Base CRD-5500 with no host or disk channel modules
CMD CRD-5530-000 Fast/Single-Ended SCSI Disk channel module
CMD CRD-5540-002 UltraSCSI/Wide/Single-Ended channel module
CMD CRD-5560-002 UltraSCSI/Wide/Differential channel module

Notes on Prices:

All prices are either list (L) price or estimated
street price (S) (wholesale with a 20% markup, yes I
know many can get better than that).

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