[SunRescue] SS2 usefulness (waz: 5 major manufacturers?)

[Sheldon T. Hall]

On Wednesday, September 27, 2000 3:05 AM, Stou Sandalski wrote:
> Yea I see your point... is the SS2 fast enough to run those services? I 
have
> one... and when I first got it, it had SunOS 4.1.1, then I killed that 
and
> tried to put OpenBSD on it... one thing I noticed was that the SS2 was
> sooooo slow, surely something must be wrong with it... I mean when you 
type
> ls it would print out one line at a time like one of them old skool
> hollywood representations of a military super comptuer.... it would take
> like 3 - 5 minutes to fill the screen with the directory listing... and 
when
> it was downloading the OpenBSD files from one of my other systems (on a 
10BT
> net), it was like downloading slower then a modem... is this really how
> these machines run or is it just me?

It's you.

I've got an IPX, which is a simplified SS2 in a smaller box, and it's a 
reasonably-fast machine, especially in character mode.  Double-especially 
if you're telnetted in, rather than using the built-in framebuffer.

Now, if I come in with an X terminal emulator, and run Netscape, it takes 
about 65 seconds to load the program and get going, but once everything is 
loaded, it's OK.

Remember that the SS2/IPX machines are early-nineties technology, and, 
although tye sold for about $10,000 when new, are about on a par with a 
'486-66 for speed as a desktop machine.

If you want to speed things up, check out the many Web pages about 
disabling unneeded services; sunhelp.org would be a good starting place. 
 Also, put as much memory in the box as you can - memory makes a lot of 
speed difference in the older/slower Sun machines.

-Shel