[SunRescue] Offerings

[Dave McGuire]

On Thu, 19 Aug 1999, BSD Bob wrote:
>What a waste of good Mountain Dew......(:+{{.....

  I was smelling Dew all day. ;)

>I liked that bit about your ISP site using Sun3's.  Lots of good
>bytes to be clocked in those olden toyz, still....  Are they going
>to be surplussing them at some point in time?   Sounds like a lot
>of good iron there.  What were they using the Sun3's for, exactly?

  Yep, they're still in service.  It's a part of the network that was built
primarily by a fellow named Mag (who should be on this list but isn't) and
myself several years ago.  They're mostly low- to medium-volume web servers for
customers who refused to use a virtual host.  Picture a row of nice big brown
Sun racks in a computer room...three 12-slot Sun VME chassis (x/280 chassis) in
each, and six Sun3/60 boards in each VME chassis.  All these machines are
netbooted from one Big Honking 4/400 machine with an NC400 board (ethernet card
that does XDR encoding/UDP checksumming/other IP overhead stuff on the board to
offload the host CPU) and a PrestoServe board (battery-backed NFS write cache)
and a metric buttload of RAM.

  There's a chance they may be surplussed at some point...but frankly there are
so few technical people left at that company (it's mostly suits now) that I
doubt there's anyone with spare time who knows how to migrate them off onto
other platforms.  Not that there's much motivation to do so, mind you...they're
running fine as far as I'm told...

>I run Apache on the home net (for testing web things if the mood
>strikes or the workload is heavy) on a Sun 4/260.  It has plenty
>of horsepower for that kind of thing.

  Oh yeah...heck, running Apache on a  properly tuned OS most people would be
surprised how much web serving a 4/200 processor can do.  They don't get slower
with age, and the *real* software (as opposed to MarketWare) tends not to get
so bloated as time goes on.

  Quite frankly, I make a good deal of money these days by taking "obsolete"
(according to The Market) hardware, slapping a copy of NetBSD on it, adding
some Apache and maybe some PHP and mSQL or MySQL, and BAM...instant useful
machine.  Sure, I'm a collector...but older machines are good for more than just
collecting!  My hat's off to the designers of the larger Sun3s and earlier
Sun4/Sun4c machines, as well as the later VAXen and early Alphas!


                       -Dave McGuire