[rescue] DECstation 5000

[Steve Pacenka]

On Mon, 2002-07-15 at 17:40, Kurt Mosiejczuk wrote:
> On 15 Jul 2002, Steve Pacenka wrote:
> 
> > So what can these things run if not ultrix?  I have a couple of 5000
> > /200's and a 3100 awaiting rehab, and have been letting them gather dust
> > lacking any media or docs.  If it is possible to get a NetBSD or Linux
> > working on them perhaps they are worth the time to fool with.
> 
> I haven't looked in a while, but from what I understand NetBSD has
> supported them for quite some time.  There is a Linux port, but
> from what I understand, it's not mature.
> 
> http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/pmax/
> 
> > And what are they comparable to in the Sun-3 and Sparc sequence? (or
> > 680x0 sequence).
> 
> They seem to be like the sun3x machines, in that while they are
> good machines, they were kindof the bastard child between processor
> architectures.
> 
> Oomph-wise, I don't know.  Most are R3000 based, although later
> 5000s (/240, and I think /150) are R4000, I think.
> 
> I was impressed with them... once had a machine that was doing
> mail duties for 200+ people, DNS, Hesiod (ugh) and serving about
> 200,000 hits/day via Apache.  And it's load average was only
> about 0.1.  That help?

Mail and Apache performance are useful metrics.  

I was thinking of harnessing some of my castoff Unixish machines to play
headless small workgroup service roles (modest file sharing, local
HTTPD, printer sharing, backup to CD-R, email filter, maybe firewall
...).  

To avoid being a dead end they'd need to have a currently supported free
OS and to leverage what people learn about configuration from more
widespread platforms running *BSD or Linux.

-- SP