[rescue] You see a wild SPARCstation 20. What do?

[Robert Novak]

On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 4:59 PM, Mouse <mouse at rodents-montreal.org> wrote:

> >> 2) I guess this will depend on #1, but is it worth bumping up from
> >> 8x32MB to 6x or 8x64MB? It's relatively cost-effective... Also
>


> Also, it depends on what you intend to do with it and what OS you
> intend to run.  In particular, as far as I can tell the hardware that
> supports what acceleration the cg14 has is undocumented, meaning an
> open-source OS will be stuck with dumb-frame-buffer levels of
> performance.
>

I'd likely be ssh'ing in most of the time, so video is not all that
important to me. But I thought I had a VSIMM somewhere in the past 8 years.
:)


> Personally - ie, this may or may not be useful as a guide for you - I
> run NetBSD and use VSIMMs; I have very few cgsixes with more than a meg
> of VRAM and am mostly willing to tolerate 8-bit PseudoColor.  I have a
> few 8M VSIMMs for the cases where I do want good colour.  And, for my
> workloads, a couple hundred megs of RAM is ridiculously over-specced
> anyway, so I don't miss the RAM the VSIMM prevents me from having.
>

256MB is probably enough... just pondering the OS options and would base
memory sizing on that.


> Or, if your uplink is slow enough it can't max out 10Mb, you could use
> the onboard le for the uplink side.
>

I have two 20-25mbit links outbound, cable and bonded ADSL2+, and I know I
have at least one SBUS QFE. So that shouldn't be a problem.


> > It should proxy or NAT okay.  I wouldn't try to do fileservice even
> > if money weren't an object -- remember, these machines are 20 years
> > old now.
>
> Well, don't forget, performance isn't necessarily the goodness metric
> here.  If it is,  an SS20 is a bad choice for just about anything.
>

Yeah.  I kinda want to use it for something, as it's one of the few Suns
I'm keeping after this round of cleaning and it might be worth the power
and neato factor . (Also have an AXi deskside tower system but it's a bit
less compact.)

Thanks all.

Rob