[SunRescue] howdy, and question about utility of old sparcstations

[Dave Reader]

On Fri, 22 Dec 2000, Steve Pacenka wrote:

> Sparcstation IPCs, two 2's, two 1+'s, and a 1.  Most of the boxes have memory 
> and hard drives.  There are a few external hard drives, monitors, mice, 
> keyboards, and CD-ROM drives.  There is enough stuff in good enough shape to 
> make a couple of complete working systems and a couple of headless server 
> boxes, 32-64M RAM + 300-1G hard drive.
> 
> May I consult your collective wisdom about what we should do with this 
> collection of Sunstuff to make it useful to someone?

Certainly here in the UK, people are willing to pay more for the external
disk cases, cdrom drives, etc, than they will for the machines. The 4Mb
simms are sought after too. Any that you don't want are probably ebay-able
to a profit. Systems dont sell very well without memory & disk, & usually
working nvram, so don't split them up unecessarily - otherwise they will
end up as landfill afterall.

> One idea is to make network-attached-storage devices that could be used by a 
> work group for auxiliary storage and remote file access.  The specs on a 
> Sparcstation 2 look about like a high-end 486, as far as CPU and disk 
> performance go; not bad for Linux or NetBSD.

The SS2 is the most usable from that lot. I run a couple of these with
Linux as small servers. I have 64Mb in them, but in practice you can do
most of what you will with a machine of that speed with 40Mb (32Mb in 4's
and fill the other slots with 1's.. they're plentiful enough).

The IPCs and SS1s crawl at half the speed - NetBSD certainly feels faster
on these than Linux, in my limited experience (i hope to prove it to
myself one way or the other, soon - at the moment none of the running
boxen are netbsd). Linux is known not to handle the Sun4c architecture as
well as it does the later ones.

> Appreciate your ideas.

I'm currently running DNS on SS2, but not much else. You can't put big,
fast, hot, harddisks in these machines, but otherwise your storage idea
should be workable.