[rescue] The time has come, the walrus said

[Wes Will]

to talk of many things;  Of sailing ships and sealing wax, and I have not
uncovered any of the token ring cd's, but I've got a student worker and
another sysadmin looking for me as well.  You are not forgotten, I just
have nothing to give you yet.  Sorry, John Schmidt.  I'm still trying to
find them in the renovated library nightmare.

On to new business for me.  What would be my best choice for an operating
system, please discuss it amongst the group, for a SparcStation20.  I have
several 4-gig drives available, the one internal and two more in external
boxen, so storage isn't an issue.  The beast has one sm81 processor, and
only 64 megs of RAM.  I don't have any bux for adding memory, but I think I
have another SuperSPARC CPU board around, it would be an sm71.  (Secondary
question, would the 71 and the 81 do any good together?  Would it be worth
the hassle?  Would there be any hassle?)

What O/S is of course dependent upon function, and this is supposed to be a
network monitor box hooked into our campus ethernet.  It will have to be
something open-source (RRDTools? something like that rings a bell), to keep
the Cisco managed switches listed and SNMP'd, or at the very least their
status checked.

There is of course no campus budget money for this.  Any expenses will have
to come out of my hide, and the skin's pretty thin these days.

I have this SS20, salvaged/scavenged, and a box of oddball parts to go with
it.  The campus network is a free-for-all out there, and I need to see
what's going on.  I've used this box before, running Aurora Linux and
BigBrother to do a pretty decent job of watching some servers, but I'd like
opinions on the best choice for this function.  I think it could do a
decent job, and I want to put this nice old Sparc back in service if it can
handle what I need.

Comments, please?

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