About seven years ago, I wrote my first article for Dæmon News about my experiences of installing FreeBSD on a Compaq iPaq desktop which would become my web and mail server for about six years.

About a month ago, I purchased a pre-owned HP dc7700 Small Form Factor desktop with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor running at 1.86GHz, 2GB of RAM and came with an 80GB SATA-II hard drive. I decided to purchase a new hard drive, a Seagate Barracuda ES 250GB SATA-II hard drive and keep the 80GB drive untouched. Since the system had quite a bit of processing power and resources, I decided to not only replace my aging web and mail server, but also to consolidate internal network services on to the new system.

While waiting for the desktop to arrive, I downloaded snapshots of both FreeBSD 7.0-CURRENT and 6.2-STABLE in both i386 and amd64 variants. Once the system arrived, a problem I ran into while setting up the system was that the BIOS would not allow me to set the SATA controller to AHCI and therefore would lose out on a couple of nice-to-have features. Once the hardware portion was ready, I decided to install 7.0-CURRENT/amd64 but ran into a nice little error: panic: No BIOS smap info from loader

I then tried to install the snapshot of 6.2-STABLE/amd64 and ran into the same error. I did the usual troubleshooting steps of going through the BIOS to disable any odd features and disabled vPro to no avail. So in slight desperation, I decided to install the latest snapshot of 6.2-STABLE/i386 and did not encounter any errors or stability issues during the install process.

Unfortunately, since I needed to get the machine ready in a hurry, I did not get a chance to try 7.0-CURRENT/i386. At some point, I’ll move to 7.0 once it has been released and deemed fairly stable by the community.

After getting FreeBSD installed with a base set of packages (vim, Python, Perl 5.8, sudo and screen) and used csup to fetch the latest Ports and Source trees, I went through and built a custom kernel configuration file to disable devices that I know are not built into the motherboard and added DEVICE_POLLING for the built-in Intel Gigabit Ethernet controller. Once I created a custom /etc/make.conf file, I went through the whole “make world” process, running mergemaster and rebooted, the system came back up without any problems. At that point, I also decided to modify /etc/login.conf to use UTF-8 for everything instead of the default. The reason was to finally be able to really look at non-Latin characters in e-mails and other files. I also changed the password hashing to Blowfish, since I had already done that with my other FreeBSD systems.

Over the course of the following week, I went through installing all of the packages running on my then-current web and mail server, copying the configuration files and content over, and testing everything. After making sure everything was working, I set aside a Saturday to cut over to the new system and start using it as a production system. It took a little while for everything to swing over cleanly, but no critical errors or problems occured.

After the new system had been running smoothly for over a week, I backed up all of the critical data from my old server and powered off the old system completely. Next was to finish the consolidation of DHCP, DNS and NTP for the internal network so that I could decommission my Sun Blade 100… but that’s another story.

So far, the desktop system has been solid and have been experimenting with it more and more. For instance, while messing with the idea of running musicpd on it, I found out that the snd_hda driver works with the integrated HD Audio controller. On the flip side, any attempts to use SMBus or SMBIOS on the system to get temperature or fan speed reading using mbmon have lead to disappointment. mbmon would complain about not finding any hardware monitoring device and promptly exits.

I also have put the integrated Gigabit Ethernet controller to the test after getting an 8-port Gigabit Ethernet switch and mounting NFS shares from my file server (which has two Gigabit Ethernet ports). Without Jumbo Frames, the throughput was decent and processor usage during large transfers was somewhat high.

At the end of the day, the HP dc7700 has made for a very nice personal web and mail server, mostly for the price that I got for it.