[rescue] Small servers (was Re: WTT: 1.5G of PC2700 for 1G of PC100)

[Carl R. Friend]

    On Sun, 4 May 2008, Patrick Finnegan wrote:

> How does software that runs on an HP x86 box not run on a Sun x86 box?

    I'm fighting a rear-guard battle at $PPOE to retain Solaris-on-
SPARC that I expect to lose in the next year or so.  Sun's pricing
on the SPARC gear is out of line -- performance-wise -- with what
can get done on an x86 system, and my argument about not wanting
to jump on the monoculture bandwagon doesn't seem to hold much water
in a world of completely non-technical Management.

    Sooner or later, some creative type *will* come up with an x86
piece of "malware" that's cross-platform and will target the under-
lying CPU; heck it might be in the wild already just waiting for a
certain moment in time to blow the x86's underlying RISC core's
microcode to all nulls and turn a goodly chunk of the computing
infrastructure into bricks in a flash (sorry for that pun).  A
SPARC system (or anything other than an x86 would be immune to
these shenanigans because they can't run native x86 code -- which,
in my book, is a Good Thing.

    I am not looking forward to the day where a simple sysadmin
needs the equivalent of a T-1 line just so he can deal with the
GUI-only interfaces that are taking over.  Give me a nice simple
serial interface (like OBP) any day of the week over glitz, splash,
and flash.

+------------------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin)            | West Boylston       |
| Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast            | Massachusetts, USA  |
| mailto:crfriend at rcn.com                        +---------------------+
| http://users.rcn.com/crfriend/museum           | ICBM: 42:22N 71:47W |
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