Re: server recomendations

[Al - image hosting services <azick%zickswebventures.com@localhost>]

Hi,

On Sun, 17 Feb 2008, Matthias Scheler wrote:
> > I looked at them and infact I have another G3 mac, but the issue with it
> > is that they are still in the larger case. I would like to use the Sun
> > Blade 100 because it is small and hopefully will run at about the same
> > speed as the G3.
>
> Why don't you get a i386 box in a 1U case? It will faster, probably cheap
> and have fine working IDE or SATA. And a second network will work without
> any problems.

There is no good short answer to this. I guess if I had to give one, it
would be I am afraid to use a PC. Every time I get involve with any PC I
lose money and I am so broke I just don't have money to put into another
server that doesn't work. I used 2 leased servers that were so bad that I
was lucky I didn't go out of business. The one was so bad that in crontab
"shutdown -rf now" had to run every 2 hours. Worse than that, sometimes it
would still not make it 2 hours before it crashed.

Even when I worked for an ISP we had problems with the intel servers. They
put $5,000 into a dual processor P3. The guy that I worked with had said
he was going to give me 2 suns (they were not ultrasparcs). They were
really old systems even then. I installed NetBSD current (this would have
been around 1.6) and eventually the whole ISP was being run off an old
sparc. Even going back to the P3 after it had a restall of linux (NetBSD
would not reconize the scsi raid card) it still just keep on crashing. So,
it was just used for a long time for NFS because the suns ran out of space
on their drives (it only needed to be rebooted once in a while when it was
just doing NFS). I think now he put a different scsi card in it and it is
running NetBSD.


> > I looked at http://zhadum.org.uk/ and it looks like you had problems with
> > getting a gigabit ethernet PCI card working in it under NetBSD due to lost
> > interrupts. I really would only want a 100 megabit, just wondering if you
> > had any experience with this and could tell me which ethernet cards work.
>
> It's not a matter of the card. Depending on the firmware version of your
> Sun machine no PCI card will work at all. The problems with the ULTRA60
> are solved in NetBSD-current. But the SB100 had similar problems which
> might still exist.
>
> About 100Mb/s cards:
> I never tried anything other than Gigabit cards because the onboard hme(4)
> was working fine at 100Mb/s.

So, I guess the question is does anyone use PCI cards in a SB 100 and if
so, what version of NetBSD are you using?

I really want to keep running NetBSD on non-intel hardware. The first time
I used NetBSD I couldn't believe how stable it was and just how easy and
well it worked. I really don't want to go somewhere else for an OS.

I have heard both really bad things and really good things about sparc64.
I guess what it comes down to is that I will probably just have to try an
SB 100 and see how it works for me.

Thanks,
Al