[rescue] Mainframe on eBay

[Isaac]

On Sat, 17 Sep 2005, Bill Bradford wrote:

> For most of the past few years, I've run SunHELP on machines that were
> donated or traded for advertising.  The current machine was a
> donation/trade from a vendor about a year and a half ago, and its the
> best one I've gotten so far.  Nobody's offered a V20Z or V210 yet. 8-)

I'm not sure I would colocate a V210 if I had one - a previous employer
bought a rack's worth to replace their (dozens of) U2's. Less than a
year later, half of them have been hit with failing (non-disk) parts,
mostly PSU fans. Could have just been a bad batch, but highly
inconvenient for my friends who still work there since they're running
their production front-end services on them.

Of course, their 6-year-old E4500's that run the databases are reliable
now, but there was that whole sordid ecache episode. I guess even good
hardware has its bad runs.

-Isaac