Hardware

epicycle is a 1u rackmount computer.

Its parts list is as follows:

case
Chenbro RM11704B
motherboard
Tyan Tomcat K8E (S2865G2NR)
cpu
AMD Opteron 150 (2.4 GHz)

memory
2 GB
raid card
3ware 9650SE 4LPML
hard drives
Western Digital RE2 500 GB (WD5000YS)
currently 2 of them in a RAID1 mirroring arrangement

CVSupped the ports tree

Then did a


# make install clean sysutils/portupgrade

FreeBSD 6.1 RELEASE x86 install

This is the extremely detailed transcript of my adventures installing the system on epicycle. An important moral of the story for subsequent buildkernels, is to compare the files in /root/3ware_driver/ with those in /sys/dev/twa, etc. Once FreeBSD has more recent versions of these files than are present in /root/3ware_driver, things will be easier. For the time being, always copy these files in before doing a buildkernel!