[rescue] Appropriate OS for Alpha?

[Jochen Kunz]

On 2002.07.15 04:00 Tim H. wrote:

> I have an AlphaServer 400 4/166 and I have Digital Unix 4.0d.  I want
> to do simple fileserving at home, some Samba, some mail, some NFS, a
very
> little web, NTP, all for internal use. 
[...]
> Is this a good OS for this use?  Another version? Linux? xBSD?  Am
> interested in soft raid mirror, but I have tape backup, and their will
> be little movement on the box, so that isn't required.
IMHO you have three choices:

VMS: I don't know VMS but is a very capable and mature OS. So it may be
a good base. But ask someone else with knowledge in that area.

Tru64: Will cost you $99 for a hobbyist licence. Capable and mature, can
Move Big Rocks, will run fine on your machine as long as you have enough
RAM (128 MB +). It is very BSDish, has Nice Features like AdvFS, ... but
I think you will need an extra $$$ licence to get software RAID
(=Logical Storage Manager (LSM)). You can do funny things like clusters
that NetBSD can't.

NetBSD: A very fine, clean, nice and puristic Unix. It will run well on
your machine. I have NetBSD runing on a AS200, the litle brother of the
AS400. Device support is good and stable. It will carry all the tasks
that you listed above well. Software RAID via RAIDframe is there,
ipfilter, lots of generic PCI and ISA devices are supported. The
economical solution, (No $99 for a hobbyist licence, just donload it.
128 MB RAM should be enough.) but not that performant than Tru64. 

I don't know how usable FreeBSD and OpenBSD is on Alphas, so no comment
here.
Linux? Please leave it where it has to be: On a PeeCee. Don't put it on
Real Hardware. 

I would say: Go with NetBSD 1.6. It will do everything that you want for
a few $ that the download will cost. You will get used to it in a short
time. Setting up a NetBSD machine with the services in question takes
only a few minutes of real work. E.g. samba: "cd /usr/pkgsrc/net/samba ;
make install" have a [insert you prefered drink here] and edit
smb.conf...

> Also, I'd like 100Mbit ethernet in the box, what affordable card
> should I look for and what OS supports it?
DEC 2114x aka tulip. I have two (SMC and cogent). Both are not
"bootable" (the SRM console does not show them with "sh dev") but they
work well once NetBSD 1.6 or Tru64 5.1 is booted. Of course with NetBSD
any FastEthernet card that is supported by NetBSD will work.
-- 



tsch,
         Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/