[geeks] [rescue] Hardware Recommendations for upgrading sunhelp.org?

[Jordan Geoghegan]

On 10/01/18 14:49, Bill Bradford wrote:
>
>> Finally, I can't help but ask.B  Why are you not looking at a Sun stack
>> as your preferred option?
>
> Same reason I moved off of the T1000 when I moved everything out of colo
> and to a business connection at home with static IPs - what Oracle wanted
> for a support contract, just to get patches, was more than sunhelp.org 
> has
> brought in, in income, total, in the past twenty-one years that I've run
> the site.B  Plus, I refuse to give them business due to moral reasons.
>
> (Had a long discussion about this when I moved to the current system back
> in 09-10ish)
>
> In honesty I can say that the site and everything related to it, never 
> even
> covered the costs of running it.B  I was lucky if I made enough to take 
> the
> wife out to dinner once a month to make up for all the time I spent on 
> it.
>
> Bill
>

Have you considered running an alternative operating system on your 
SPARC gear? I have a T3 running in my living room that uses OpenBSD and 
runs like a dream. I use it for websites, email and sometimes as an SSH 
jumphost and it works great. The hardware raid controllers are 
supported, as well as the OpenBSD software raid. On SPARC gear that 
supports it, OpenBSD also supports running as an LDOM host. That box 
gets many thousands of hits each day, and many attacks as well, but just 
keeps chugging along. Considering you can get a working T3 or T4 off of 
ebay for dirt cheap, it could be worth looking into.