[rescue] new to the list: new E250 owner, just saying hello.

[dsimmons]

SYN

I have been reading this list with great interest. I look forward to
learning some interesting things here that I might not come across
elsewhere.

I am anxiously awaiting my first personal piece of class B equipment: I
have an E250 coming via an ebay auction. I got Dual USII/300's, a gig of
ram and 6 9's for $0.99+$135 shipping. :-) I bought the N+1 p.s. in
another auction, just because it was there. I also got a front bezel for
it because not having it would have bugged the crap out of me. It's my
toy, I guess I can purchase non-essential components for it if I want
to. :-)

A couple of these are still in production in the comm room where I work,
and I'm looking forward to having one I can reload anytime I feel like
it. I have a few different learning experiments I'd like to do with it.
First, it might be fun to put a different distro on each drive and be
able to boot to any of them anytime to gain experience with some more
non-Solaris OSes. So far I have run Debian and Gentoo on E250/450's.
Everything was great except for video driver problems which I ignored
since the boxes were just web servers. Another experiment I'd like to
try is a performance comparison between a <em>Properly Partitioned</em>
Solaris box and one which is all one partition (+swap), as Sun seems to
be beginning to recommend. I'd also like to see what happens to
performance when you have the option of giving every file system its own
disk. And, I'd like to know, just how slow IS software RAID on one of
these boxes, anyway? As I said, this machine will start out as a toy. I
may put it to actual work at some point, but for a little while, I'll
probably just sit and listen to the hum of all those fans and repeat my
new mantra: "MY Sun box. MY Sun box. MY Sun box." :-)

Cheers,

Doug "Q: Geek?" "A: Guilty." Simmons
Procedures and Systems Analyst II
Morris Library Systems
Southern Illinois University Carbondale