# Is the cciss kernel module available in the installation kernel & other general Q's



## osx-addict (Feb 27, 2009)

Over the weekend I'll be trying my hand at moving from Fedora Core 6 to FreeBSD in an effort to regain lost security of late due to lack of proper confines for PHP.. (long story).  Anyway, I'm going to really tighten up security once this is up and running.. 

So-- A few questions I've got that I'm hoping to get answered:


Is the cciss kernel module part of either the floppy based installer or CD ISO images?  My machine is a Compaq Proliant 6400R with SmartArray 5304 H/W Raid controller and the cciss module is required to see the >500Gb of hot-swap SCSI drives.  If not, how can I install it, in order to bootstrap things?

Once things are installed, I'm planning on running several jails -- notably for email (currently using modifed Exim (SA-Exim to be exact) but thinking of moving to Sendmail), Apache, BIND (or dnscache), Postgres, and one for Visualworks (Smalltalk environment) -- since most of these talk over sockets, is there going to be any issues with one jail talking to services running in another jail (e.g. Visualworks in one jail talking to Postgres in another jail via TCP sockets)

Anyone have suggestions on swap sizes -- should they be roughly the same as I've been using in Linux?  I realize that most people suggest 1.5x the RAM size give or take.. I've got 1.5Gb of RAM so perhaps 3Gb of swap is good with room to spare?

I gather that UFS2 is the default file system.. I looked into using ZFS but it doesn't appear to be ready for prime-time -- particularly for a quasi-production server hosting 2 domains and running a Seaside-based web-app for my kids school..I guess I'll stick with UFS2 then...

I think that's about all I can think of for now..


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## trev (Feb 28, 2009)

osx-addict said:
			
		

> 1. Is the cciss kernel module part of either the floppy based installer or CD ISO images?  My machine is a Compaq Proliant 6400R with SmartArray 5304 H/W Raid controller and the cciss module is required to see the >500Gb of hot-swap SCSI drives.  If not, how can I install it, in order to bootstrap things?



Yep - from GENERIC config:

# RAID controllers interfaced to the SCSI subsystem
device          amr             # AMI MegaRAID
device          arcmsr          # Areca SATA II RAID
device          ciss            # Compaq Smart RAID 5*



> 3. Anyone have suggestions on swap sizes -- should they be roughly the same as I've been using in Linux?  I realize that most people suggest 1.5x the RAM size give or take.. I've got 1.5Gb of RAM so perhaps 3Gb of swap is good with room to spare?



This has been discussed at some length recently. See http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=1561


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## osx-addict (Mar 2, 2009)

Thanks!  I was actually able to finally install it w/o issue over the weekend.  It recognized my SmartArray controller w/o issue.
I'm still getting used to things after having used Linux for the past ~3-4 years but so far I'm happy.. The entire 'ports' environment is pretty slick -- no need to *beep**beep**beep**beep* around with compilation/linker issues that are common for items in Linux..


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