[geeks] IPCop and pfSense...

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Fri, 2008-04-18 at 12:58 -0400, nate at portents.com wrote:


> However, the D201GLY2 and "Little Falls" based boards will have CPU
> heatsinks taller than the backplate, which could very well be an issue for
> the case I mentioned above (since the Apex MI-100 has a power supply
> directly over the motherboard).

There is a note somewhere on the Logic Supply web site about a cheap
replacement for the heatsink from Digikey to make the D201GLY2 fit in a
rack mount case.

> > There are units that stick right in the IDC scoket on the MB, which means
> > *no* cabling.
> 
> Tempting, but it's really hard to determine which cheap adapters truly
> support DMA and aren't really just PIO.  The Addonics CF - SATA HDD
> Adapter is only $32 and is the same form factor as a 2.5" notebook hard
> drive, seems like a good way to go:
> 
> http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_reader/adsahdcf.asp

How do you determine which CF cards properly support DMA?  Booting from
CF has been very annoying for me.

The Emphase FDM4000 line supports only Ultra DMA.  Alas for me I'm
having some DMA glitch that I can't seem to work around.  When the
machine boots from a CD, it can use th Emphase module just fine, but it
gets stuck when trying to boot from the Emphase module.

However, that line as been EOL'd anyway, and the replacement (FDM4000X)
supports both PIO and DMA.  They have very thorough datasheets on their
web site, so I highly doubt they are lieing about DMA capability.  Since
the one that is giving me trouble is one of the EOL'd ones, I'm likely
to just get a new one rather than completely follow up on the trouble
with the old one.  I might try installing a different linux distribution
on the module just to see if there is some chance it is a problem with
my custom compiled kernel.

The other brand I hear about most frequently is Transcend.  This one I
think might be PIO only.

One option could be to adjust a LiveCD to boot from a flash drive and
run from a ramdisk.  This would leave less memory free for cache usage
(or require more RAM, but I think you said you were already maxing
that), but it would remove some of the problems of PIO mode.  For my
project I can't do this since the video capture card I'm using is
incompatible with 3 gigs of ram being present and I can't spare any of
the 2 gigs installed for this use (my capture card requires the kernel
vmalloc 384megs, and then my application requires about 1600 megs).