[SunRescue] Q on "optimal" OS for Sun4c machines, now that Solaris 8 won't run

[DaveMcGuiremcguire at neurotica.com]

On July 12, James Lockwood wrote:
> Geez, and I thought I was cynical.

  ;)

> Forced obsolescence is something quite different.  Forced obsolescence
> would be if your brand new shiny toaster had a timer in it that would
> force it to self-destruct after 5 years or 5000 slices of toast.
> 
> What Sun is doing is analogous to stopping the sale of toaster
> enhancements.  Your old Sun toaster still makes toast, in fact it makes
> better toast with recent versions of Solaris than it did when it was new.
> Software support for the versions of software that it does run will
> continue for a number of years.

  I understand your point; it is one that I hadn't considered.  But
you must admit...there are attitudes within Sun's workforce that
insist that machines as recent as SS20s are "absolute trash",
"ancient", "not a viable computing platform for any application
nowadays"...these were all fairly recent quotes from a Sun employee
regarding an SS20/81 here (my main desktop machine that I just
upgraded to an SGI Indigo2/R10K).

  I then took him to the computer room of a company I'm associated
with up in NJ and showed him a rack full of SS2s that are each
pulling in a few hundred $$$ per month.  He was flabbergasted.  He
just couldn't comprehend that machines that weren't shiny-brand-new
could possibly be useful anymore.  I then asked him "what's so
different between what we're running on these machines now and what
we ran five years ago (bloated Perl scripts notwithstanding)?" and he
couldn't answer me.

  I've found this is a common attitude within that company, and I
think it influences their operating system support decisions.  How
much manpower would it *really* take to maintain that MMU code
etc. that you talked about?  Not much, I suspect, compared to how much
they've got available.

> NetBSD will indeed continue to support hardware.  _New_ hardware support,
> on the other hand, is lacking.  I distinctly remember being badly burned

  ...pure manpower/motivation issue.  The Sbus Ultra support is a
particular thorn in my side...the code has been in the tree for a
year or two now, but now the port maintainers have shiny new
Ultra10s to play with, so it seems the Sbus ultras aren't as
"interesting".  *grumble* So sometimes the newer machines get even
more attention than the older ones.

> Now it's 2000.  UltraSparcs have been out for what, 5 years?  Can I stick
> with NetBSD when my computing needs outgrow the SS2 or SS5 sitting in the
> corner?  Fine-grained SMP and support for any modern Sun gear is still a
> far-off dream, as is being able to "plug and play" a wide variety of SBus
> cards.  No other Unix I've seen can touch the ease of system installation
> with Jumpstart, and Sun's NFS implementation is top notch.

  Agreed.

> Unfortunately, SPARC is a fringe port for all of the free Unices.  It
> doesn't have the price/performance or popularity of x86, and you lose the
> integrated hardware support that you get when you run everything from a
> single vendor (even if some of that support does eventually expire). 
> Sure, we all know that the hardware is "nice", but that doesn't sell it
> for a lot of people. 

  I dunno, from my perspective it's pretty mainstream.  I can drive
through my area and point to no less than a dozen buildings in which
there are SPARCstations running NetBSD.  They're all around me.  Seems
pretty mainstream to me.  Maybe I'm just lucky?

> >   Use your sun4c machine, Ken.  Don't stop using it until it can no
> > longer do the job.  Run a free OS on it and you'll always have a
> > useful machine.
> 
> If NetBSD does indeed fit your needs better than Solaris, then by all
> means go for it.  Keep in mind that neither one is in any way perfect, and
> _always_ consider your intended use first.

  Absolutely agreed.

         -Dave McGuire