I've been bringing up a surplus Netfinity 5500 M20 I got on ebay really cheap. The guy probably lost $100 on shipping, the machine is huge. It's entirely impractical for a home server, but who can resist that many blinky lights.

I'm running FreeBSD 6.2. There have been some hiccups and I thought I'd put any solutions into some searchable text somewhere... like here... just in case anyone else is scrounging surplus big iron.

The basic configuration is a quad xeon 500 machine with 2GB of ram and 6x36GB Ultra 160 drives in RAID 5 with a hot swap spare installed, so there's roughly 136GB of main (fast) storage, and in the IDE bays I wedged 2 500GB Hitachi drives on a Promise FastTrack 100 TX2 for /media.

Useful note 1: The Netfinity doesn't like the Adaptec 1200A controller, it just doesn't recognize it in any slot. The FastTrack works fine and you can configure the array using the BIOS drivers, which I first flashed to current. Also, you need 24" IDE cables, which are hard to find. Don't get ATA-33 cables the first time.... The cables fit more easily if they are single device cables (2 connectors total, rather than 3 for a master and slave configuration).

I had some network problems. The system is connected to a Gigafast EE2400SV switch (a great bargain! but not actually "giga," rather mega as in 10/100, not 10/100/1000). The switch has an address table that updates every 5 minutes... who knew? So if you move a device from one port to another it disappears until the address table updates. This is not a problem with the NIC. But anyway, out went the Linksys LNE100TX based NICs (2x) an in went a pair of 3Com 3C980C-TXM NICs, which are compatible with the hot swap PCI channels at least, even if they won't do much else for me.

An oddity is that my display shows the words "REV" in the background, no matter what. I changed video cards from an old ATI Rage 8MB card (the built-in video only has 2MB) to a Nvidia TNT 16MB card, but the bizarre background text remains. Could be BIOS problem. We'll see if it's still there in xwindows later.

For now, I'm reinstalling BSD 6.2 over FTP. I did a full install from CD and CVSUPed to RELENG_6_2 and did a buildworld and got a barf at IOCTL.C, tried the STABLE branch with no improvement. Since I had very little invested in configuration (make.conf, kernel.config, cvusup config only) it seemed more expedient to just start over.