On FreeBSD, this doesn’t work so well. However, you can tell manually tell the Crucial site what motherboard you have and it will tell you exactly what sort of RAM is best.

This is fine if you know what motherboard you have.

if you don’t, the answer is dmidecode(8) (/usr/ports/sysutils/dmidecode). This utility grabs the same information which the Crucial thingy does, so all you need to do is find the info you need.

This is pretty easy:

# dmidecode -t baseboard
SMBIOS 2.3 present.

Handle 0x0002, DMI type 2, 8 bytes
Base Board Information
        Manufacturer: ABIT <http ://www.abit.com.tw>
        Product Name: 694X-686B (VP6)
        Version: v1.0 ~
        Serial Number:

Not masses of useful information returned from my old system, but still enough to identify the motherboard as an Abit VP6. This is all I need to know to find out what memory I should be buying.

I already know what size sticks of RAM I have, but just incase you need to check:

# dmidecode -t memory
SMBIOS 2.3 present.
...
Handle 0x0021, DMI type 17, 21 bytes
Memory Device
    Array Handle: 0x0020
    Error Information Handle: Not Provided
    Total Width: Unknown
    Data Width: Unknown
    Size: 512 MB
    Form Factor: DIMM
    Set: None
    Locator: BANK_0
    Bank Locator: Bank0/1
    Type: Unknown
    Type Detail: None

Again, not the most useful information ever seen, but enough to tell me I have a 512MB stick in bank 0. (On my newer desktop, I get much more useful information like the speed and voltage of the RAM.)

Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ar0s1d    677G     99G    571G    15%    /raid5

It’s less than 1024GB thanks to drive manufacturers using dodgy calculations, and also it’s RAID5, so I lose a disk’s worth of space (250GB). Seem to be doing a reasonable job of filling it up though ;)

This morning, though, I was greeted with the this email:

This email was generated by the smartd daemon running on:

host name: yomi.jamesoff.net DNS domain: jamesoff.net NIS domain:

The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:

Device: /dev/ad0, Self-Test Log error count increased from 0 to 1 `

Arrgh :argh:

At least that’s the system drive rather than one of the new ones, but now I’m going to have to buy a new system drive and prepare to migrate over to it. At least thanks to having plenty of space, I have full dump(1)s of the drive so even if it does die before I replace it I can recover fairly easily.

I also got apcupsd setup on my two machines so that the server monitors the UPS status, and the desktop picks the status up from the server. apcupsd also works on Windows so when I’m booted into Windows for gaming it still looks after me. Unfortunately, if the power fails this won’t actually work as the network switch in the study isn’t currently UPS’d, so the desktop won’t be able to communicate with the server. I’ll be fixing that soon. I also want to see if I can get apcupsd to talk to the 350 so Roz’s computer can shut itself down in a power failure too. Oh, and I want to make my desktop shut down faster than the server to give the server more runtime.

I think I’ll scribble a howto page for jamesoff.net after I get it all sorted :)